No there is not something. That's a misconception.

The author is under no obligation at all. Of course a request is no problem. But then if that request is ignored, then that's no problem either. Who knows why there is no response. Maybe the person has other things in life needing attention. Maybe they have a bad day/week/month. Maybe they are burnt out. Maybe they have already responded to you 100x or maybe they just don't like your name.

If they do respond -- great! It's likely in their interest to respond to bug reports since it's likely in their interest to have less buggy software for themselves (if they use their own software) or for their customers (if their customers use their software). But maybe it's not, maybe they have moved on, or maybe they are just on vacation. If they are nice, then they tell you. But even that's something they don't have to do.

You are free to dislike them for that, and you are free to not use your software anymore.

You are usually even free to fork the project if you want your pull requests in and they keep being ignored or rejected. If others think like you, you get a community right away. But many people don't fork. Because it's a lot of work suddenly being a maintainer. Then you suddenly get those requests and opinions and pressure. Don't like that? See! That's the issue here! If you don't like it, then don't criticize others for not liking it either.

> Well, the problem is that it's not so absolute. Publishing something normally invites feedback and it's awkward to completely ignore it. Just like it's awkward when you report a bug and get silence.

I think in a perfect world every request would be polite and reasonable, making what you say here objectively correct. Since this is not the case, this sadly becomes a subjective opinion.

The fact of the matter is that when one deals with the general public in any form you get all forms of good and bad interactions.

There's also an inherent asymmetry between the effort it takes for a small number of project maintainers to respond to a large number of project consumers.

There's no clear-cut answer here, but I think it is reasonable to state that someone sending requests to a project should set their expectations to match whatever licensing or contractual agreements are present in the projects they interact with.

For the most part, the people that the product is offered to don't insist that the creator do work on demand. A small portion of obnoxious users make a point of insisting that the creator who already gave away their work for free remains under some kind of obligation to do more work.

For the most part, creators giving away their work for free don't insist that the people it's offered to accept it. A small portion of obnoxious creators make a point of insisting that some portion of people who aren't using it are obligated to use their work.

Obnoxious users are effectively discouraging, because not only does the population of users outnumber the population of open source authors by many orders of magnitude, not only also because the population of those who don't have the skills to do it themselves or contribute in a functional way is entirely contained within the 'users' category, but most importantly because each obnoxious user has only the authors of the few open source projects that they're using to be obnoxious to. Open source creators who talk about obnoxious users (usually without naming them) are often effectively criticized within the vast hordes of users.

Obnoxious open source creators are easily ignored, since there are so few of them, and they have millions (give or take an order of magnitude or two) of potential users to harrass. Open source users talk about these open source creators (usually calling them out by name), and those creators become well known as obnoxious cranks to be avoided.

Maybe obnoxious people aren't the problem. Maybe reasonable people are.

After all, I wouldn't lose sleep over an obnoxious person making an obnoxious demand. They'd be summarily ignored.

But I would feel a tinge of guilt if someone made a good faith effort to offer an improvement, and the contribution was technically sound, but I just didn't get to it.

> I'm not suggesting a real obligation, but there is... something?

The only something there is, is what the license specifies.

Licenses vary, but generally the gist of it is that you get to use that code for free (with various limitations depending on license) and that's all you get. There isn't any something beyond that.

You're always free to negotiate and pay for a support contract if you prefer more than what the open source license grants you.