One thing we can do as users is champion the idea that open-source authors don't owe us anything. Having support or getting help with problems is great, but the author's already done us a huge favor by writing the software we needed in the first place, and they aren't required to go beyond that or do anything specifically for an individual.
Yeah this is what I expected the article to be about: what drives me insane as an open-source developer is how a paying customer who has an outage at the worst possible time will be so much more polite and grateful for the help I'm contractually obligated to give them, than so many random people on forums are about the product not having a feature they want.
It makes me want to give my customer's the source and tell them they can do whatever they want, and then ignore the rest of the community except for high-quality pull requests.
Mostly agree, however, at some point the author's DO NEED to do something beyond creating the thing or else face the extinction of that piece of software.
I think most people who have created something will generously bend over backwards to help individuals in the early stages of it's lifecycle. You can see that all the time on github.
The problems come when the project takes off to the point where there isn't enough support for the number of people using it BUT the software isn't mature/popular/fit-enough to be "under the wing" of a larger organization who can afford to pay for it's maintenance and evolution.
Is there a way to bridge the gap between author's-generosity-support and corporate/organizational stewardship? We do have the social networks in place to allow that, they're just focused on different objectives.
Wasn't there a thing recently were an author just gave away one of his node.js libraries, and then it was used maliciously by the requester to attempt to hijack bitcoin wallets?
