I have mixed feelings on this advice. On the one hand, it's not fair to criticize volunteer maintainers too harshly. On the other hand, the same person would pr

I have mixed feelings on this advice. On the one hand, it's not fair to criticize volunteer maintainers too harshly. On the other hand, the same person would probably see forking + marketing a fork as an attack—maybe not in the case of a small utility library, but certainly in the case of larger projects. A fork would be seen as an attempt to split or take over the community around the project because, well, that's exactly what it is. If you feel no sympathy for the users commenting on the issue you ought to feel not sympathy for the original maintainer in that scenario, and that seems like an unhealthy dynamic for open source as a whole. (For what it's worth I would feel no sympathy for maintainers that act like the one in this issue, but in general I would prefer people to spend some real effort on discussing and resolving disagreements before trying to fork anything important!)