I get what you're saying, but even without the requested feature, the existing code also took time, mental effort and opportunity costs to come into existence — the user sees it and naturally imagines, "there's more where this came from".
Not all users are at the same level of experience as you (a maintainer); this doesn't make them lesser people or even lesser developers (sometimes they're just good in a different problem space than yours), but it makes their expectations a lot less realistic. Don't offload your annoyance on the requester — sometimes they don't know that their request is significantly harder than they think.
> Don't offload your annoyance on the requester — sometimes they don't know that their request is significantly harder than they think.
I give/gave an estimate based on my hourly rate so that this misconception is cleared of as directly as possible. If you want it for free, you better convince me that it is worth the opportunity cost for me to implement it.
Stating your price for a given feature is not "offloading your annoyance" and I didn't see anybody implying that people asking for feaures are "lesser people" or "lesser developers".
> I didn't see anybody implying that people asking for feaures are "lesser people" or "lesser developers".
I admit that I may be reading too much into the dynamic at play here.
To be precise, naturalgradient did not say anything about the intrinsic value of users, but his/her comment says "people who have never contributed anything" and "supporting their laziness", both valid sentiments. The complaint is that the user is inconsiderate; I'm positing that it's better long-term to teach those users to be better users and eventually good maintainers. It's wishy-washy, but the good attitude of maintainers and other users is what taught me how to behave in open source.
If your policy is to charge for features, please disclaim it in your README. It's not a wrong practice, but you should set up the correct expectations.
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Because this is HN: For anyone looking for brass, this problem is muck and there's a product opportunity here.
Not all users are at the same level of experience as you (a maintainer); this doesn't make them lesser people or even lesser developers (sometimes they're just good in a different problem space than yours), but it makes their expectations a lot less realistic. Don't offload your annoyance on the requester — sometimes they don't know that their request is significantly harder than they think.