Because if it's open source or aimed at developers in some way, it wasn't built for you. It was built for everyone. It works by everyone helping everyone else use it.
Maybe you should get out your credit card and call a commercial software vendor if you want personal attention?
I am a developer and I understand the need for person-power to continue the development of software. But that doesn't mean I have unlimited time (or money) to support the development of all of the software I might engage with.
If a new user (including devs using libraries) needs to join real time chat in order to get help with a "I tried X and I thought I'd get Y, but I saw Z instead" type problem then that seems pretty hostile.
Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not. The community around software grows over time as the top of the iceberg of users forms a community of active participants.
But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.
Edit: Plus as a Kiwi I am, as a general principle, against anything that reinforces the tyranny of time zones. Which synchronous communication definitely does.
> Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not.
Yeah, that's the problem.
Just last week I saw a GH issues post in which someone was reporting problems with the HTML output of an MIT licensed email template editor, and someone had replied that he fixed all of the tags/CSS, and then edited his link to a gist with the changes, saying that "his boss told him that was proprietary."
What was surprising was not that a random corporate stooge is both a complete scumbag, and thinks table tags are valuable, but that everyone else in the thread accepted the response without mockery, and no one bothered to look up who that guy worked for and harass the company on social media.
> But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.
I don't think community denotes real time communication. Community is also when Theo was widely praised for dropping all Adaptec drivers from a release version of OpenBSD quite a few years ago, to punish them for giving him a run-around on drivers about 'iNtElLeCtUaL pRoPeRtY' (despite the fact that they were a hardware company). Community is also when people find a hidden daemon in OSX that contacts an NSA / CIA server and post it publicly rather than anonymously to a journalist without the details of the process used to uncover it.
Community was better 15-20 years ago than it is now, by a wide margin. All those "transactional" had people better pick the right jobs with valuable equity, otherwise they'll find themselves short of keeping their kids and grandkids middle-class when everyone else has "transactional'd" themselves all the way to slums and soylent green patrolled by Amazon-branded Ring / Terminator cops.
edit: while I'm at it... the company who is using an MIT licensed email template editor but doesn't think employees should post PRs for it to fix bugs is https://www.linkedin.com/company/flexmr/about/
I don't want to be part of a "community" to use software, I just want to do the thing I set out to do.