MPs are supposed to serve all their consistuents, though. Open source maintainers' duty to their users is more controversial; but I think most people would agree it's not as strong as an MP's.

> then, well, you must be self serving, and feel that these bugs are not genuine or important.

It's harder to keep track of bugs that aren't on a bugtracker (hence the name) if you don't have time to fix them right now.

I regularly fix easy bugs submitted to me on IRC, but if I can't do it right now, then I require the user to open an issue on my bugtracker or else I'll forget it and fix one of the other 216 bugs on my bugtracker instead.