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

I don't know if it's just me, but if you read the forums and bug reports related to open source projects, it feels like programmers today are a really entitled lot.

The tone that people take when filing bug reports for what is basically free software is reprehensible. People are doing work for FREE to benefit you, and you take a tone with them like you are a prince and they are your royal goblet holders? Who taught these human beings their manners?

I totally understand the frustration when you write a large system in Python and then the Python committee makes a breaking change that makes your life very difficult. However, you didn't pay for Python! These sorts of changes should be expected, and if you didn't expect it, you are the fool. And in any case, you aren't paying these people a cent, so speak politely to them. You are basically a charity case from their perspective.

I think what you're saying is true in the case of someone just throwing up some code they wrote online without any plan of supporting or developing it further.

But once you call it an open-source project, and you have docs and a roadmap and an issues page and stuff, you're making an implicit contract with people who use it that it will do a reasonable job of solving the problem it claims to solve. The user is choosing to use it over other alternatives and investing time learning and integrating it, so it doesn't seem at all unreasonable to me for them to be frustrated when they realize that due to some bug or limitation it doesn't actually solve the problem for them that it claims to.

As an analogy, if you give someone free food and it makes them sick, are they justified in getting mad at you? I think most people would say yes. IANAL but I'd imagine that if you got food poisoning from Ben & Jerry's free cone day due to negligent sanitation practices or something, you could probably sue the company just like if you had paid for it.

Or, if a member of some sort of volunteer community board is doing a bad job, people will complain about it. An open source maintainer is basically in the same position.

Of course, that's no excuse for being rude to them, but you also shouldn't be rude if you paid for something and it doesn't work. I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything to reduce hostility towards maintainers when it happens. But it's not true, in open source software or anywhere else, that just because something is free there are automatically no expectations around it.

So, we insist open-source software developers to keep their "implicit contract", but we (as society) allow companies to buy companies that develop and maintain open-source to close-source it or just close the entire establishment? Without legal consequences.

Companies that shut down open-source dev teams are at least usually honest that that's what they're doing at the time that they do it. Open-source projects that actively evangelise—by extolling their community and documentation, presenting polished websites, in-app screenshots and shiny video demonstrations—then fail to make an adequate effort to serve and relate to the userbase the project has intentionally drummed up are not being similarly honest. If you don't want to serve the users, quit or turn off the evangelisation.

> If you don't want to serve the users ...

I don't understand how Guido van Rossum's message was interpreted as "he doesn't want to serve the users". His message said (to me) that he will continue, but he will not make decisions.

> Companies that shut down open-source dev teams are at least usually honest that that's what they're doing at the time that they do it.

This sentence implies that Guido van Rossum did something worse (than these companies) today. Is this what you are saying or I misunderstood?

BTW: I don't know him personally. I don't use Python regularly and I don't have any knowledge or position on Python's developers struggles and disagreements (if there are any).