Comment by phicoh

I wonder if a few people going beyond what is reasonable, is representative of open source projects.

For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never gets very big. It exists, may have a few users. But on a larger scale, nobody knows it exists.

The exceptions are projects where developers spend a lot of time on the project at the expense of a day job. Though there is the possibility that they may have a hard time having a day job in the first place, which may have let to the situation with the open source project.

In general, I think we do have a culture problem where we think projects need to be successful. And people working on a project 'need' to support users (who in general don't pay).

And that expectation of free work happens throughout the open source ecosystem as well. Distributions expect projects to fix bugs for free. Open source projects expect libraries and compilers to be maintained.

Ultimately, change has to come from people who refuse to work for free. Doing something as a hobby for free is perfectly fine. As long as it stays within the scope of a hobby project.