I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source …

I agree his responses could be more compassionate and show more effort, but i feel your characterization is over-critical. There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible. The software _cant_ have every form factor, _some things_ need to be set in stone as a North Star. These aren’t scummy practices, these are realities of a time-bounded existence.

Thanks for reading. I'm not sure what you think is scummy unless it's just having a subscription? If so, you are going to love my next article on how subscription apps are the best invention ever and the only business model that makes sense! Definitely subscribe so you don't miss that one.

Software owner learns that posting blog posts about their support woes also doesn't lead to an outpouring of love.

> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. This was the biggest ( 1 ) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off? Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know. Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic). It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not …

It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself? It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.