Comment by palata

I understand the frustration.

> Open source first felt to me like a way to give power back to ordinary people

I think it's the difference of philosophy between Free Software and Open Source Software: Free Software cares about the people, Open Source Software not so much.

> most people won’t care and the few that do might still treat you like crap

That's completely right, people are mean. I do open source for myself, I choose copyleft licenses (I like MPLv2/EUPL), and if people want to fork my project I am fine as long as they honor the license. If they do a good job, I can bring some of their changes back, to my benefit. If they ask me for features, I invite them to fork.

> I’ve submitted a handful of pull requests and I’ve already run into the classic “Your patch works and provides a feature some people might like, but I don’t like it, go away.”

That's where I think you misunderstand open source. It is their right to not take your change, you should not bully them for that. Your right is to fork the project and add your changes. Do it!