There are tens of millions of people and organizations that constantly press complete strangers for money in exchange for doing absolutely nothing for them, and you are asking when it is OK to politely request that people you provide a service for support you financially?
When did this kind of hand-wringing become the social norm in open source? I don't remember that being the case 10-15 years ago. I honestly find it embarrassing to read such posts.
I respect your opinion & understand your point. Maybe that's because 10 to 15 years ago fortune 500 companies weren't extracting as much value & putting this much pressure on open source maintainers. Here's a recent twitter thread that demonstrates the problem & how the community really feels about supporting maintainers https://twitter.com/anehzat/status/1638809705966612483 & https://twitter.com/ljharb/status/1638958313198211072 I also know a lot of people that have been subject to tech layoff but expected to continue maintaining packages long after they have departed from companies. There's no doubt that fortune 500 are getting huge benefits from the open source movement especially with the introduction of tools that help increase the pace of development, communication & feature requests. This was not the case 10 to 15 years ago...
> putting this much pressure on open source maintainers
What "pressure"? You mean baseless demands to work for free?
Just tell them to fuck off.
> I also know a lot of people that have been subject to tech layoff but expected to continue maintaining packages long after they have departed from companies.
Just tell them to fuck off.
This is the real world. Growing a spine is not optional. If telling random beggars to shove it is the difficult part, I strongly recommend to work on that before learning yet another cool frontend framework.
And for those that for some reason don’t want to use the exact phrase “fuck off”, let it be known that you can say the moral equivalent of this phrase while being super polite – you still need to be firm though.
When did this kind of hand-wringing become the social norm in open source? I don't remember that being the case 10-15 years ago. I honestly find it embarrassing to read such posts.