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Comment by jjice | Hacker News Reader

Completely agreed. There has always been bits of entitlement to open source projects by users, but I feel like increase in package managers and ecosystems (which I think is generally a good thing) has lead to a _huge_ increase in people being entitled assholes to maintainers.

Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with a single maintainer. The demanding attitude from someone who wants a feature that doesn't even make sense for the package to an individual who has a separate full time job and a family who does this for the love of the game is very upsetting.

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There really should be a donation field “Estimated resolution cost” with payment options, associated with any user request. With a default payment preset by the maintainer to optimize mindfulness.

“I am here to help, but you shall pay with your cash or your cheap guilty soul!”

The problem with that is that there's a number of examples about how your entitlement increases markedly when you feel you have paid for something.

So if you don't have enough hours in the day, more money doesn't solve that problem unless it can displace other things in your schedule, and can make the number of people attempting to impose, and their attitudes, worse.

Good point. I feel like there should be a simple solution for this. You know, dealing with humans.

But they are not simple.

The largest problem with dealing with humans is handling both good and bad faith cases.

In particular, if you can't rely on the escalation path being willing to rule a lawsuit is "bloody stupid" if you offer, say, a discount on "all fruits" and someone tries to argue milk is a fruit, then you wind up with endless escalations of rules lawyering and perverse effects.

> Just look like the GitHub issues of a fairly large package with a single maintainer.

If there is a single maintainer then they aren't really a project leader since they aren't leading anyone and there is no community of maintainers.

When there are other maintainers and other people volunteering their time to work on the project, then it is time to start thinking about succession and governance.

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