You end up having unwritten obligations to your users.
You can start from the position that you can write your software, make it public, and you have no obligation to do more. Some people do just this. But once you have to (or feel that you have to) answer support questions, fix bugs, add features, make releases and do so on an ongoing basis, you can end up in a situation where you effectively have a second full-time job.
I'm not saying that this is desirable, or even necessary. But it's a reality for many open source project maintainers and contributors. You get sucked into it. End users have expectations, and it's only human to try to meet them. I've personally been very badly burned by this, and I've get to contribute at anything but a minimal level for the last six years as a result.
One of the things which I don't like are that people can have very unreasonable attitude towards what they can expect from a person who does this in their spare time who helps them for free, sacrificing their spare time for someone else's benefit. The longer I've been doing this, the more I appreciate that it's not as sustainable as we might like to believe, and that being fairly compensated for work is no bad thing. We should be more willing to say that we would be happy to fix that bug, or add that new feature, so long as we are paid for it. But in many projects this isn't politically or practically possible.
You can start from the position that you can write your software, make it public, and you have no obligation to do more. Some people do just this. But once you have to (or feel that you have to) answer support questions, fix bugs, add features, make releases and do so on an ongoing basis, you can end up in a situation where you effectively have a second full-time job.
I'm not saying that this is desirable, or even necessary. But it's a reality for many open source project maintainers and contributors. You get sucked into it. End users have expectations, and it's only human to try to meet them. I've personally been very badly burned by this, and I've get to contribute at anything but a minimal level for the last six years as a result.
One of the things which I don't like are that people can have very unreasonable attitude towards what they can expect from a person who does this in their spare time who helps them for free, sacrificing their spare time for someone else's benefit. The longer I've been doing this, the more I appreciate that it's not as sustainable as we might like to believe, and that being fairly compensated for work is no bad thing. We should be more willing to say that we would be happy to fix that bug, or add that new feature, so long as we are paid for it. But in many projects this isn't politically or practically possible.