“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. ;-)