You're talking about OSS - you didn't buy it. OSS does not entitle you to anything. Tenderlove and the Rubygems maintainers spend their time so you don't have to. If it doesn't fit your needs - okay. But don't act as if somebody owes you anything.
"Oh, I made a boneheaded error and now your code is 100x slower than it should be? Tough sh*t, fix it yourself. I owe you nothing!"
That's not a reasonable mentality to have if you want adoption. Obviously the Ruby devs don't feel this way, but you seem to. That sort of attitude is nonsense and short sighted.
If you release some script or small program which was useful to you thinking that it may help someone else down the road, I agree, you don't owe your users anything. However, when you position your solution as something people should adopt (e.g. RoR, etc) then you do owe a level of quality and support to your users (not saying RoR doesn't, just a random example.)
I love OSS, but every time it bites a user in the behind it loses mindshare.
I never said that, but most projects welcome pull requests.
> I owe you nothing!
True, it's the short version of the MIT license.
> That's not a reasonable mentality to have if you want adoption.
Yes, maintainers should always try to take care of their projects and to accommodate the needs of their communities.
> Obviously the Ruby devs don't feel this way, but you seem to.
You are over-interpreting. But I hate seeing more and more OSS contributors getting burnt out and steamrolled by a self-entitled rout.
No, you really don't. The fact is: they owe you something, but it's OK, since you give it away for free.
>If you don't want that responsibility then don't release your code or get out when things become serious.
Or else?
>That's not a reasonable mentality to have if you want adoption.
What if you DON'T want adoption? Or you want just the smart kids that can contribute back to adopt your code?
>Or else?
Or else people just don't use your software and don't buy into your ideology. If you don't care, fine, but obviously many OSS proponents do.
Actually EFF has little to do with OSS.
Perhaps you meant FSF. In any case, most OSS software that isn't GNU has very little if anything to do with FSF. Some OSS authors, especially those MIT-licence inclined, even hate its guts.