That's great for you, and the other commenter who said the same. I'm pleased you feel comfortable enough with that.
> Any social obligation that people imagine you have (or in your case perhaps more importantly that you imagine you have), is just that: imaginary. If you can't stand the idea of some stranger on the planet not liking you because you refuse to spend your time fixing their pet bugs, that would be a good topic to bring up with your therapist.
I mean, I'll ignore the elitism in this statement, and presume you meant this sarcastically. But the idea that you associate this kind of unassertiveness with mental dysfunction is probably not a million miles wrong.
However, it is not an unusual mental dysfunction, and one that many more software developers suffer from than the general populace. Assuming that your bravado is matched in your offline life, that would put you in a very small percentage of programmers.
And declaring that as a source of shame rather than an opportunity for support only serves to further entrench the stigma and impostor syndrome. Which then leads to further unassertiveness and self-worth issues. Which then leads to more people feeling they are not worth being paid for their time. Which leads to more people on the internet making them feel shame.
Which means I can agree with you wholeheartedly when you say:
> You are under literally zero obligation to fix or update anything
... and at the same time be pleased to see people attempting to improve the situation for those thousands of developers who, in their own heads, do not feel that zero obligation as a daily reality. I may not agree it's the right approach. I may not even agree that it will work. But I'm not going to dismiss the premise, just because it's not how I personally feel.
> And of course, just because something you did crosses some arbitrary line of popularity doesn't mean the universe suddenly decides you are entitled to compensation for it. If that's how you hoped things would go, then you should have started a business to sell it in the first place.
This on the other hand is just plain naivety. The idea that every small side project would even support the costs of a business is not just assertiveness, it's delusional. Would you buy a shell like fish? A json query language like jq? A context summerizer for your shell like starship? An ad blocker? A file manager? And would you pay more than a payment processor or business bank account would take in fees?
Something can be used by millions and make hundreds of dollarbucks in aggregate, and yet be practically worthless individually.
Which is, again, one of the stated goals of Tea. I'm pretty sure it won't be a through-the-roof success, but again, happy to see people trying new ways to tackle the problem. You know. Beyond telling people to go get therapy.