LCA: How to destroy your community

Well, my opinion is that you should accurately and neutrally report the issue. Within a project of mine, I like when people do just that. But attempts to demand something or manipulate developers while at it totally ruins it.

Being an active Qt developer, I filed about like 20 bug reports to the Qt tracker. The key to a successful fix was always to provide a meaningful description, a complete test case, and preferably, a patch or the hash of the offending commit. I invested my own time, but it always payed off. The crucial understanding here is that it was *my* problem, not really theirs.

Returning to end user software, lack of any real support sucks. No possibility to pay for it sucks too. Though I'm not sure much people is actually willing to pay. I kinda like the feel of commercial-quality software and approach. Unfortunately, for all but the largest, corporate-backed software, this means closing the sources down.