I'm an open-source maintainer who doesn't always answer issues and pull-requests right away. It sucks, I'm trying to get better. I can understand the frustration, but these sort of posts (or pleas or whatever you want to call them) always lack any sort of acknowledgement of the possibility that some maintainer's life may be different than yours.

> You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted.

The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as soon as I submit it." You mention all the things you've done by the time you've submitted the ticket on Github, and I can appreciate all of that (I even wrote an entire article espousing your side [1]). The thing is, you did all that on your own time, on your own schedule. You're asking the maintainer of the open source project to help you finish solving your problem right when you submitted the ticket, i.e. on your schedule, with no acknowledgement for theirs.

To you, it might not seem like much to ask, for the maintainer to drop what they're doing to respond to your request. But some open source maintainers are very busy. They may get between 100 and 200 emails a day during the week. The Github notification from your submission is one of them. They may own a company, with employees to whom they are responsible. And they may manage many different projects, including several open-source projects. Even if it only takes 20 seconds to physically comment on your issue or pull request, it still requires a mental context switch, which they may not have time for that day, or even that week.

Furthermore, to be frank, it's often the sense of entitlement and lack of understanding that makes it unenjoyable to respond to requests. Granted, not all contributors feel entitled, but even having to deal with one entitled person is enough to destroy your motivation for the rest of the day. Imagine that you've spent years on some project, and fixed a hundred issues submitted by users, and helped many contributors get their pull requests merged. And now imagine the 101st ticket is someone who comes along and says, "All the time and hard work you've put into this project and provided for anyone to use free of charge is not enough; you're a disappointment because you don't respond fast enough." It's exhausting.

"If you don't have time to maintain the project, then mark the project as not actively maintained so we can move on," you say. But it doesn't quite work like that. It's not that the project isn't maintained. The maintainer may just be really busy this month. Or maybe they've been really busy for 6 months. They're still maintaining it, they just might not have time to look at things for a little while. Labeling the project as "unmaintained" would be short-changing all the people who are still actively using and developing and maintaining it.

"But my change is really small, just merge it in," you say. The problem is, you don't really have the context to make that claim with 100% certainty. You're not the one who has to deal with all the issue that may come rolling in due to some unintended and unforeseen consequence of your change. Also, if there are a hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people using the project without a problem, and you're the first person to report an issue, chances are your issue is not that urgent. That means, even for a simple patch, the maintainer has to weigh benefits of the patch with the potential that it breaks stuff for other users. The only "small patch" is one that changes a comment in the code. If you're changing an actual line of code, the maintainer rarely sees it as "small".

I don't type all this to make excuses. Like I said at the beginning, I understand the frustration. I'm not just a maintainer, I'm also a user of other open source projects, so I know. Uncertainty sucks. This is an area I'm trying to get better about myself as a maintainer. I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses. But I decided to submit it anyway, in case it helps anyone who truly wonders what the hell is going on, on the other side of that pull request.

[1] http://www.alfajango.com/blog/communicating-with-engineers-a...