> If you don’t mind me probing a little further, what is the motivation to work on it?

Not the person you're replying to, but I do it because it's fun. Programming is a passion of mine, and has been a part of my life since my dad gave me a book on BASIC when I was 8 years old. I love solving problems with code. Giving it away as open source is, in a way, philanthropy to me, with the hope that at least some of the things I create are useful to others. There's also a bit of a "political" aspect to it, in that I think it is bad for society for all useful programs to be locked up in proprietary software, making everyone dependent on profit-seeking corporations (whose interests and incentives are often hostile to their users) to provide the software they need to use in their daily lives. My work is a small contribution to combat that.

That joy I feel hits a wall when I run into an entitled, lazy user who thinks that I owe them something more than what I've already given. If most users were like that, I just wouldn't do it. Or at most I'd do it, releasing under a pseudonym, and have no public issue tracker, pull request mechanism, or public contact information. That would make the project worse, not better, of course, but the most important thing to me is my mental health and my happiness. If that's selfish, so be it.

> > they can fork it

> I get that, but I also think it is too pat a narrative at the same time.

I'm not sure what you expect someone to do with that statement. So what if it's "too pat"? That's the reality of the situation. It's the maintainer's way or the highway. If you don't like it, then open source has a truly wonderful escape hatch that proprietary software doesn't: you can fork and go your own way with it.

Many open source communities have problems, certainly, but I think many of the better ones are the some of the closest things we have to true meritocracies. If you do the work, and the work is good and valued, you get a say. If you don't, you don't. And yes, I would say "providing good, helpful, actionable feedback" can be part of "doing the work", so people who don't write code can have a say, depending on how well they are able to provide value to the process. But people who just want to take: no, they don't get a say, and that's exactly how it should -- and must -- be.

kelnos beat me to it but: because working on it is fun. I don't think most people in our industry will understand decade+ open source maintainers of large projects and that's fine. I don't understand how designers can do what they do either. I would say that those of us who stick around and don't burn out quickly tend to share my ideas of "owe nothing" and "have fun" much more than "I must make sure I am always responsible and responsive to my users desires" who tend to seem permanently stressed before burning out.

I use my words carefully: I don't "owe" my users anything but that doesn't mean I don't "give" them anything. It's charity as opposed to taxes; I do so freely and on my own terms rather than obligation.

On forking: yes, it's a lot of work and forking would also be a lot of work. That's exactly the point. Lots of people over the years could have forked Homebrew but no meaningful forks have taken off because those who are most dissatisfied with our decisions are least willing to do the work to solve these problems.

Hope that clarifies. Thanks for the polite discussion :)