I agree. The second you take any donation, you can't use the excuse of "I'm doing this work for free. Leave me alone if you don't like it" because at that point you aren't doing it for free. While you don't necessarily "owe" donors anything, that won't really matter because in their eyes, you were paid to do work, and you didn't do it.
> The second you take any donation, you can't use the excuse of "I'm doing this work for free. Leave me alone if you don't like it" because at that point you aren't doing it for free.
No, I don't agree. Communicate clearly that donations are in no way payment for the work being / to be done, does not constitute any preferential treatment / service agreement, and you're good.
This setup works for me well, and I have no issues with people's expectations.
One way to think about this is that people should donate based on value that they've already gained from the project, not additional value that they expect in the future.
That said, for an active maintainer who is currently accepting donations (ESPECIALLY recurring donations), making a good-faith effort to deliver on requests from supporters (certainly bugs, and ideally features) is expected. Failure to make that effort doesn't mean you owe anyone anything, but it might mean you're a jerk.
> for an active maintainer who is currently accepting donations (ESPECIALLY recurring donations), making a good-faith effort to deliver on requests from supporters (certainly bugs, and ideally features) is expected
Even if the maintainer makes it clear and explicit that donations don't grant such expectations? If a donor feels entitled despite clarity from the maintainer, that's on the donor.
If you want to pay the maintainer to work on a feature you want, the proper course should be to just contact the maintainer and work something out, no?
That's fair, and to be clear I wasn't saying that's how it should be. I just know that a lot of people like to complain when they see "Project X got $N of donations" and feel like as a result they're entitled to "customer service"...at least in some of the drama of I've seen.
That said, the drama might be more outlier...I've never really had an open source project that's big enough for people to want to give me money for it, so I will totally admit I'm speaking out of ignorance.
