Somebody has given you a gift, their time and talent, and your response was 'give me more'. They replied with 'I've given you all of my time that I want to', a

Somebody has given you a gift, their time and talent, and your response was 'give me more'. They replied with 'I've given you all of my time that I want to', and now you are looking for ways to argue that point with them, which at best will take more of their time. No. Remember your manners and thank them for the gift. You asked, they answered, the most important thing at this point is to respect the author's time by not arguing with them about how they choose to spend their time. I can readily see the concept of "I wrote this code, somebody else might find it useful, so I'll make it available, but I don't want to bother with doing anything else with it." If an author wants to write my feature, cool, but I just don't see any problem in 'submit a patch' answers. To me it's a the distilled essence of "I already spent all the time I want to on this thing, I gave you a gift, I don't owe you anything, if you value this feature you're welcome to do it but I don't value this feature and am not interested in working for free." - but it saves all the arguments that would come up if you actually gave that answer, as people with time on their hands would take every point and try to pick it apart and take up more time arguing. By explaining reasons, you're just handing out ammo to fire back at you. Saying no without leaving the no open to argument is the only way to limit demands on time.