Agreed, but that's only half of it. The second half is that open source users should stop imagining the things they choose to use for free as "products".

Users of open source often feel entitled, open issues like they would open a support ticket for product they actually paid for, and don't hesitate to show their frustration.

Of course that's not all the users, but the maintainers only see those (the happy users are usually quiet).

I have open sourced a few libraries under a weak copyleft licence, and every single time, some "people from the community" have been putting a lot of pressure on me, e.g. claiming everywhere that the project was unmaintained/dead (it wasn't, I just was working on it in my free time on a best-effort basis) or that anything not permissive had "strings attached" and was therefore "not viable", etc.

The only times I'm not getting those is when nobody uses my project or when I don't open source it. I have been open sourcing less of my stuff, and it's a net positive: I get less stress, and anyway I wasn't getting anything from the happy, quiet users.

It used to be that annoying noobs were aggressively told to RTFM, their feelings got hurt and they would go away. That probably was too harsh. But then came corporate OSS and with it corporate HR in OSS. Being the BOFH was now bad, gatekeeping was bad. Now everyone feels entitled to the maintainer time and maintainers burn out.

It's a trade off, we made it collectively.

I think this gets complicated when you have larger open source projects where contributors change over time. By taking over stewardship of something that people depend on you should have some obligation to not intentionally fuck those people over even if you are not paid for it.

This is also true to some extend when it's a project you started. I don't think you should e.g. be able to point to the typical liability disclaimer in free software licenses when you add features that intentionally harm your users.