> One source of toxic behavior is entitled users.

It's hard to explain to people how insane things can get when you give away your work and time for free, in the hope that it will benefit people. Some things I've experienced:

  - People yelling at me in DM's when I didn't edit a podcast for community meetups in time
  - Alcoholics joining in on FOSS meetups because they wanted attention
  - People in the community getting spammed with crypto scams impersonating me that I had to answer to
  - My work being whitelabeled and sold to investors to raise money to the extent people accuse me of stealing from others
  - Smear campaigns making their way to my employer when I decided not to work on a particular open source project anymore
  - I gave away hardware to community members; the reward was tech support requests
  - Suicidal community members using me as a therapist (they claim I "saved their life"), followed by taking private (non FOSS) source code and giving it to to my competitors to advance their own tech careers

If you are going to get into open source communities you should go in with a plan for how you're going to deal with these kinds of things when they happen to you.

Likewise, in the open-source world, after a certain number of things start depending on your work, people often say it "should be considered a public good" - which is particularly confusing because public good seems something entirely different from its other well-known definition.

I think this whole idea of "if you make something nice that other people like, you are obligated to serve people forever" is totally bogus. I (well Claude+Codex) write a lot of LLM code these days and many of the base libraries are open source. If I had to write ratatui it would take a long time. But if someone decided to bully the ratatui maintainer I wouldn't ever know. And there's no way to un-bully someone anyway.