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> > let's be great to one another. > I think that includes giving other maintainers the benefit of the doubt. That includes not taking being ignored as a perso

> > let's be great to one another. > I think that includes giving other maintainers the benefit of the doubt. That includes not taking being ignored as a personal insult, I think. While I wholeheartedly agree with this, and also want everybody to be nice, it's not necessary for open source to work. A maintainer who refuses gratis help in form of bug reports is just a maintainer who leaves gratis things on the table they could pick up. Other projects who take the gratis help will do better. Evolution will weed out the idiots who don't get it. Think Linux would have gotten big if Linus had said "stupid people, they think I take their contributions for free"? No, he deliberately used a model where thousands of people worldwide contribute to his project for free!

Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Problem is picking up those gratis things from the table has a cost to the maintainer. And sometimes those gratis things are worth less than that cost. Multiply this hundreds of times and the cost to the maintainer for picking up free things can quickly add up.
- wildmanx 6y ago
  And that's why the maintainer is free to ignore them, if they choose to. They should not be hanged for prioritizing their time. Others can pick all that up. Fork the project, use the reported issues and proposed patches, whatnot. Accusing the maintainer of being arrogant for ignoring contributions is as wrong as accusing the contributors for wasting somebody's time. These recent open source related threads on HN are quite an eye-opener for me how much misunderstood the whole concept is. In that concept, nobody is committing or promising any of their time or energy, so should not get judged for it either. Neither maintainers nor users nor contributors.