You owe them nothing. That fact doesn’t mean maintainers or users should be a*holes to each other, it just means that as a user, you should be grateful and you get what you get, unless you want to contribute.
Or, to put it another way: you owe them exactly what they’ve paid for!
Many open source developers feel a sense of responsibility for what they create. They are emotionally invested in it. They may want to be liked or not be disliked.
You’re able to not care about these things. Other people care but haven’t learned how to set boundaries.
It’s important to remember, if you’re not understanding what a majority of people are doing, you are the different one. The question should be “Why am I different?” not “Why isn’t everyone else like me?”
“Here’s the solution” comes off far better than, “I don’t understand why you don’t think like me.”
Some open source projects which are well funded and/or motivated to grow are giddy with excitement at the prospect you might file a bug report [1,2]. Other projects will offer $250,000 bounties for top tier security bugs [3].
Other areas of society, like retail and food service, take an exceptionally apologetic, subservient attitude when customers report problems. Oh, sir, I'm terribly sorry your burger had pickles when you asked for no pickles. That must have made you so frustrated! I'll have the kitchen fix it right away, and of course I'll get your table some free desserts.
Some people therefore think doing a good job, as an open source maintainer, means emulating these attitudes. That you ought to be thankful for every bug report, and so very, very sorry to everyone who encounters a crash.
Needless to say, this isn't a sustainable way to run a one-person project, unless you're a masochist.
[1] https://llvm.org/docs/Contributing.html#id5 [2] https://dev.java/contribute/test/ [3] https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/chrome-friends/574...
I used to work on a kernel debugging tool and had a particularly annoying security researcher bug me about a signed/unsigned integer check that could result in a target kernel panic with a malformed debug packet. Like you couldn't do the same by just writing random stuff at random addresses, since you are literally debugging the kernel with full memory access. Sad.
What I do is I add the following notice to my GitHub issue template: "X is a passion project and issues are triaged based on my personal availability. If you need immediate or ongoing support, then please purchase a support contract through my software company: [link to company webpage]".