I can understand this behavior from the perspective where bug reports provide cost rather than value. If my piece of software works for me in my use cases and I am not interested in fixing it for other people (as is the case for the author), then bug reports are costs, rather than value. Minimizing costs in this scenario means refusing to accept costs (in this case, bug reports) unless something of value (in this case, money) makes this deal acceptable.

Looking at bug reports (as in, really looking) takes time. Time costs money.

What's weird about someone refusing to spend their limited time on things they don't want to deal with?

Or do you think that reading and comprehension are activities that take no time at all, and therefore have no cost attached to them?

I understand the point of the original article, since I agree that most people are entitled whiny jerks much of the time, myself included. I’m not here to argue that anyone should be obligated to provide help or fixes for their open source software, paid or otherwise.

I do feel that’s an important point — paid or otherwise. There’s a similarly whiny attitude people have: “I paid $5 for your thing, so you have to do as I say!” I don’t really think the distinction is how much it cost. If you have a support contract that says “in exchange for paying me, I’ll help you with X, Y, and Z”, that’s a different story.

But what I really wanted to remark on: to the point of “activities that take no time at all”, when I report a bug, I often spend hours of my time trying to understand what’s broken, narrowing it down to specific conditions and observations, often a attempting to fix it myself, and then writing everything up and whenever possible including test cases, screenshots, videos, etc. By the time I hit send on that bug, I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project.

It’s also possible to just take 5 seconds to fire off “your stupid app is broken your stupid too fix it”. All I’m saying is that painting all bug reports with the brush of “trying to get free support” discounts the amount of free QA open source projects can benefit from.

> I may have contributed hundreds or thousands of dollars of my time to the project

Sure, but that was you deciding to do it, and it's commendable.

This is very different from someone emailing you and telling you to (or expecting that you will) donate thousands of dollars of your time to a project.