The points you make aren't unreasonable. It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can't be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an

The points you make aren't unreasonable. It is necessary to establish clear boundaries of what can and can't be provided by the maintainers. If not done at an earlier stage of the project, the support burden becomes too much to bear at which point the maintainer transfers ownership, and the project suffers from catastrophic consequences such as the xz backdoor we're talking about here, or other cases where the project mostly stalls and serves as an ego-boosting platform for the new maintainer, as was the case with PhantomJS[6] before it was shut down. This can also happen in your life, where a "friend" sees that you possess a certain skill, and then gradually tries to push an inordinate amount of their personal work related to this field onto you. Personally, I think it's best to use an approach with extremely clear communication as to what the maintainer can and cannot provide. This can be seen, for example, in yt-dlp[1], where the consumer is clearly informed upfront that not providing detailed information as requested will lead them to block said consumer; or sqlite where their position regarding contributed patches[2] and support[3] is similarly made clear. Having a shouty BDFL like Torvalds can also help improve code quality[4] and questionable contributions[5], though it is better that the shouty BDFL makes statements that are professional and do not show as much aggression; so for example, "Mauro, shut the fuck up"[7] would become "Mauro, your response is completely unbecoming for a Linux kernel maintainer, and is not in line with the promise of not breaking userspace." [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&labels=triage%2Csite-bug&projects=&template=1_broken_site.yml https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/new?assignees=&label... [2] https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html [3] https://www.sqlite.org/support.html https://www.sqlite.org/support.html [4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/29/linux_6_8_rc2/ [5] https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident https://cse.umn.edu/cs/linux-incident [6] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/14541 [7] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75