“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

> I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.

Leading a large open source project must be terrible in this age of constant outrage :-(

It's PHP and not Python, but every time I read something like this from a major open source figure, I always think of this old PHP mailing list thread:

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=50696

That's a good read. I feel like the "customer is always right" mentality does quite a bit of harm to OSS support.

Also reminds me of that dev (who I can't seem to search up) who had their email printed as part of a open-source software license in a car manual and would get ridiculous email from people who had car trouble.

OTOH, way back, when I had a TV receiver card by Hauppage, and a new Linux kernel broke something, I posted a description of my troubles on Usenet, and within 24 hours, the person who had written the Video4Linux subsystem replied asking for more details (which I gladly provided), and a few days later, the bug was fixed.

That, I think, was the most awesome "customer support" experience of my life. I did make a point of being polite about it, however, which I consider a ground rule for dealing with people, especially if I want something from them.

But it was so awesome to post to a random usenet group about a driver problem and have the person who wrote the driver personally approach you for details. You don't get that with Windows, for sure. ;-)

I had the same experience. Suddenly Emacs Gnus reader stopped working, about 11:00 on a Friday morning. I posted the bug and had a reply from Lars Ingebrigtsen with an explanation and a workaround by 13:00. I think it was fixed by the beginning of the following week.

My experience of trying to get help from Microsoft on the other hand is, well let's just say not quite so impressive; they kept me on hold for 45 minutes once and never did solve my problem.

Back in the days Microsoft would have amazing customer support. And I'm talking about "API customers", many times I've seen them go out of their way to fix third party programs not working correctly by adapting their platform, it was a very efficient process. I guess that doesn't work as well at their current scale, or they care less because they're not building up market share.