My experience with many GNOME projects (like f-spot) and some of the more geeky projects I use code from (like ctrlproxy) is that they have this sentiment.

There are also many (many!) open-source projects (like alpine) where paid developers are creating a useful product for a certain audience (the University of Washington’s email users), and that project is still willing to listen to feature requests and bug reports from non-washington.edu users.

I won’t presume to speak for all the other OSS developers out there, but my personal motivations tend to be along the lines of:
1) The project (either existing or new) has to fulfill a personal need. I don’t generally work on a piece of software in my free time, which I will never use.
2) I have to enjoy working on the project. There are many projects out there that fulfill a need I have, but aren’t a fun problem/environment/codebase.
3) I get a personal benefit from releasing the code and participating in an open development process. The most obvious of these is the software that I need (see #1) improves just by making it available to others. This happens through other people giving bug reports, suggesting features, and a lucky few projects actually attract other developers (in the scheme of things, this is a relatively rare phenomenon).

There can be other intangible touchy-feely motivations, such as a sense of altruism, the good feeling of helping other people, contributing to the betterment of the field rather than wasting time watching TV, etc. But, at least for me, these are secondary benefits that came only after participating in OSS development. It’s kind of like a vegetarian that gave up meat for the health benefits, and then after the fact develops a sense of moral superiority over those that do eat meat.

The author frames it as ‘users and their failure to relate to developers’ - but I think it illustrates ‘developers and their failure to relate to users.’

When a developer says “submit a patch”,”can you add a developer to the project” or, “go do it yourself” the developer is failing to relate to his users. And they are his users. If he didn’t want them, he could have kept the program unreleased, or not distribute as a binary as a way of setting the bar high enough to weed out most users.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways developers can relate to users without having an abrasive attitude.

“I’m one person, doing this for the fun of doing it. If you can help, we might be able to do that work. If you can’t, I hope you’ll understand why what you’re asking for might be slow in coming.”

That would be the right response.

And for developers who lack the social skills to write it themselves, let them copy and paste from me.

Rather than tell people their feature request is unimportant, tell them that they’re right. Their feature is a great idea. If they can contribute, it may get done faster. If they are unable, it may be a while.

This way, the developer is acknowledging the person rather than dismissing them, without promising anything.

Positive responses create positive feedback. Negative responses create a negative feedback loop. Responding with “submit a patch or do it yourself” is dismissive, and for non-developers is understood to be abrasive and negative.

Most people I know, whether user or developer, would prefer to be in a positive feedback loop.

In many cases, not only is the OSS developer working on these projects with no compensation, but they likely also have a real job that takes up a good chunk of their time, and even some semblance of a “life” outside programming. There’s often a sense that folk feel like they are entitled to your free time. In some cases they also seem to feel entitled to the time when you are at your real job. At the end of the day, of -course- your real job that puts food on the table and your spouse or whatever takes priority over your OSS projects.

But another reason I might add to the list of reasons to do the project is simply “because I think it would be fun”. A couple of my projects I tackled because:
1. a chunk of people were asking for it
2. i would probably like to use it too
3. it sounds like a fun project
Now when you are trucking along enjoying yourself and suddenly all you hear is “this is terrible because X is broken” and “I don’t think you did this right” or … you get the idea… Typically you can brush that off for a little while but it keeps chipping away at you until you start not finding things fun. That’s generally when I start saying “send me a patch”. I think we all take a lot of pride in our work and if all you hear is negative comments it’s really damaging to said pride. No one wants to work on something that they know is just going to cause complaints.

I generally work alone on my projects but at some point it starts getting overwhelming and I start considering asking other interested developers to join. But then what happens? No one wants to help. (in some cases) Now it looks like you are involved in a lot of projects that have a lot of developers and that’s great. Me, I just don’t have time for some of my projects, but people depend on them, and so I’m stuck in this state where I feel like I’m begging people to help out but no one wants to stand up. Now, I’ll certainly say that folk are starting to trickle in and help, and that’s great, but there was a long period of time when I thought that some of my projects might die off because I’m just not likely to have time for them anytime soon.

The ideal I think is of course the rare times when you have some company actually sponsoring/paying or your development. Then all of a sudden there’s a good reason to tolerate being asked to do things that aren’t fun/interesting. Nothing sucks more to me than having something come up which I know exactly how to do, but it’s sooo damned tedious to do that I might keep finding other things to work on so I don’t have to be bored. But if there’s a compensation, hey… why not…

Bah, sorry for ‘bother’ your post with such a long comment. =) Great post!