I’ve written things like this before but apparently the right people weren’t paying attention. The free/open software movement depends substantially on volunteers. Yes, some companies contribute by paying their employees to work on projects they’re interested in and, of course, there are companies like Red Hat that make significant contributions. But without those volunteers, open source would die and we’d all be suffering under Windows and complaining about how much we hate Word.
That’s especially true of the maintainers who not only contribute code but take on a significant managerial role as well. As any manager will tell you, any decision they make will annoy someone. Sometimes the annoyed will complain vigorously. That’s not necessarily bad. You see it a lot on the Emacs devel list but by and large the discussions are polite and largely restricted to the matter at hand.
But not always. Sometimes a certain type of people can come to feel entitled and complain that the maintainers are not doing what they want. Often, as in the discussion I linked, the complainant doesn’t really understand the situation or know what’s going on. I pay only casual attention to the Emacs devel list but even I know that Eli, far from “not feeling like it,” was actually working behind the scenes to resolve some real problems with merging gccemacs to the main branch and that the process of merging is ongoing.
Eli and the others ARE VOLUNTEERS. They contribute their efforts and even though most of us know them only as maintainers, they have lives, families, and real jobs to attend to. They deserve our gratitude, not our abuse. Note that I’m explicitly not talking about people like Andrea and Yuuki. They’re making their own contributions and are entitle to query the maintainers on why those contributions aren’t being merged as fast as they like. Also note that their posts were polite and constructive.
I get that not having things move as fast as you’d like can be frustrating but all of us need to remember that guys like Eli are doing a great job for free and they deserve our gratitude. If we’re not going to pay them, at least we can throw an attaboy or two their way.