Your analogy is extremely specious. A better analogy is an unheard of band playing an open mic night. The audience is doing the band a favor, by giving attention, possibly giving word of mouth reviews, not the other way around. The audience has every right to give feedback and help the band understand they don’t sound good. The band can ignore that feedback if they want, but they sure have no justification to look down on the audience for saying it, or saying, “play your own music if you don’t like it.”

Giving my attention to your FOSS project is compensation. In fact, FOSS is so over-saturated with options that giving my attention is high compensation. Project maintainers are lucky to have an audience of users and should value their feedback and create solutions for them, if they want the attention to continue or they want compensation to increase.

What doesn’t make sense is to treat users like they don’t matter, ignore critical bug fixes or feature requests to prioritize dabbling or recreational features, and disingenuously turn around and claim users are rude or should be shadow banned for stating justified frustration over this, all under the false pretense that just because the compensation is in the form of attention and engagement (similar to currying “likes” or “votes” on social media), and not currency, this somehow means there is zero social contract between maintainers and users.

If users are kind enough to express frustration in bug reports or feature requests, it means they are making an extra effort to hopefully not have to leave your project and stop using it. It’s an attempt at a constructive solution by letting the maintainer know there’s a social obligation problem happening. That seems way, way more positive and reasonable than a disgruntled maintainer immediately shrugging it off and going straight for the nuclear option of, “well if you don’t like it, leave.”

I think your analogy is just as flawed (and you have not explained why yours applies more than mine, as you do not know the motivation of maintainers), but lets go with it for now.

So your argument is that in compensation for your attention you are entitled to give uninvited criticism, or lets say tell them to play songs you like? Moreover, how do you assume that your criticism or the songs you would like to have played somehow take priority over other peoples interests? If I would be in the audience for some unknown band I certainly hope that people who don't like the music leave instead of heckling the musicians.

You are saying that maintainers have a "social obligation" by giving you something for free, so you are entitled to their time, because that's what it boils down to. To make another analogy (again admittedly flawed), would I be entitled to demand you reply to me, because I have given you my attention in this discussion?

> So your argument is that in compensation for your attention you are entitled to give uninvited criticism

I would maintain that in many cases it isn't uninvited, just unwanted. There are many repos on github that are just somebody's pet project they did for fun or because it filled a need for them, and they aren't inviting criticism because they just shared code in case anyone else could use it or learn something from it.

However, many FOSS projects are very much like the band analogy above in that they aren't content to upload videos of their jam session to youtube but actively seek to attract an audience. They make project announcements on places like HN, they show up in forums and tell people how blazing fast their project is and it's a good fit for someone's use case, they have fancy websites, etc. They ask for your attention, and in so doing invite criticism.

There’s no such thing as “uninvited criticism” in FOSS (or open mic night). Merely by exposing your project to be acquirable by end users, you have invited criticism. And if you go further and promote the project, give talks about it, recommend it, seek sponsorship, seek contributors, then you’ve invited criticism even more so.

Of course you can ignore that criticism - that was never in doubt. But users are fully justified to make the criticism and it would be rude and wildly unreasonable to reply by saying, “if you don’t like it, leave.”

It's analagous to the brain-rotting line of thinking that pirating games is a benefit to the developer because "exposure".