I applaud his approach, at it demonstrates respect to other developers by explicitly communicating what others can expect of him. Although it's not required, I would hope that all devs who open source a project without any intention of heeding public issue trackers follow suit and proactively clarify that intention.

(Nothing--philosophically or legally--requires anyone to maintain an issue tracker for an open source project. There was a time when open source typically amounted to a tarball on an FTP server, and maybe a -dev list.)