Honestly aligning intentions with reality

Something that's stuck in my head is how bug tracking and ticketing systems are a signifier of a commercial support relationship and aren't entirely appropriate for a community project, what's the SLA for tickets opened with a volunteer, and who do you escalate to? Triaging these bug reports _should_ be a full-time job, if there was someone paying for it, even someone from GNOME Foundation to collect reports from distros or something, but this situation isn't unique to GNOME or KDE and isn't resolved by pretending the relationship between user, packager, and upstream developer is something that it's not.

Users and promoters of distros and FOSS have all sorts of ideas of what an upstream and a distro do, or should do, but that doesn't always seem grounded in the actual reality of the amount of effort volunteer packagers and developers can actually do. Some packages are maintained by paid staff, by Redhat, other orgs or multi-vendor consortiums like Linux kernel itself, but it's not clear what any specific relationship is, when is the packager/developer a volunteer or a vendor, when are you a customer, a non-customer or a peer? It seems that a lot of people like cosplaying as a vendor when volunteering and putting FOSS in the world, but it obscures when it's appropriate to escalate or back off, or who if anyone is accountable for anything. It's not appropriate to bring "let me talk to your manager" energy to a volunteer, but it can be when the FOSS is supported by a commercial org and they are supporting it as part of a product, even if you aren't a direct customer.

Collecting all these bug reports like Pokemon, which represent some amount of work put in by Fedora users, but not having any real plan on what to do with them is kind of shitty to all involved, developers who might want those reports and users who might want those issues triaged and fixed. If the software is being provided "as-is" and there isn't really any accountability to fix issues, then why collect the reports at all, why waste peoples time? If the packagers or developers want to use some sort of bug tracking system for their own benefit, then don't open it to the public, doing so is a kind of implicit advertisement of support that may not actually exist. Good intentions are laudable, but sometimes one has to know their own limitations, and be firm, honest and forthcoming about what their capacity is to respond to issues, otherwise everyone involved gets stressed and frustrated, which is an avoidable consequence.