Octave dev demands money to release bugfix that he already wrote

Misleading.

Dev requests a non-zero tip as sign of appreciation for fixing a rare and obscure bug in 6 hours, for a minority. For a tip over a certain threshold he offered to rework that existing fix (aka invest more time) to include it into the next stable/support release instead of in v-next.

(For the lazy people:He did exactly that after receiving a 75 USD gift certificate for Amazon)

Now, why is this title (to my non-native reading comprehension skills) negative, if patio11 is (again, and probably rightfully so) repeating his mantra of charging a higher rate in a sibling thread? 75 USD seems quite a good deal for 'someone works 6+ hours to fix a tricky bug that has a trivial workaround and is rare to begin with', right?

This doesn't shock me in the slightest. It's (apparently) a fairly esoteric bug, and the developer openly wonders whether anybody actually care about it being fixed quickly. For that reason, he asked for a proof in the form of one donation of $1 or more. That's a cheap way to test whether anyone cares about it.

In a somewhat related fashion, I have a similar system that I apply to myself on some of my hobby projects. For the more serious ones, I aim to achieve near-100% code coverage in unit tests. One of the side effects is that everytime that I ponder adding a feature not out of need but out of curiosity, challenge or completeness, I ask myself: "do I care enough about it to write tests for it?" It's basically a litmus test for keeping bloat at bay.

Don't like it? Spend six hours and fix it yourself. This guy is well within his rights here.

Well, he's demanding any non-zero donation, so, it could be done for $1. I don't see how this is really newsworthy at all.

He asked, not demanded, and he was going to release it eventually anyway.

Seems like an extremely reasonable request from the developer to see if anyone actually gives a crap about what he's doing. Good on him.

Great way to balance the demands of the minority against the billion other things that affect the majority.

One dev to another, you're a whiny little bitch.

I do the same thing, every second Friday. If I don't get paid, I stop working. Even worse, I don't even start working unless I have a pledge from someone to give me money in 2 weeks or less. Hold 'em hostage, show 'em whose boss

But yeah, these open source guys have a lot of nerve, not giving away stuff for free. How am I supposed to run a business with suppliers who can arbitrarily raise prices for future supply?