Exactly. It’s at the point where we practically need a required class in high school to teach people how to interact constructively with the maintainers of software. A particularly good class would be the one teaching people that hardware and software configurations are incredibly complex, varying so much that even the best software will eventually fail to anticipate some issue. There are problems that simply cannot be found until a user talks to a developer!

People who are angry enough to torpedo a project might not realize just how easy some software fixes can be, if the developer is told more about the problem. When users E-mail me about a problem, often I can fix it within hours (or even minutes!) once I know what to look for. A return address is also important because sometimes I have to ask follow-up questions; besides, when I’m done I always want to send a link to the fixed version.

I’ve done open-source for a long time. In the beginning I was outright shocked at how some people behaved, much like this article states: even though I had not received a single E-mail (to my clearly-published address at the time), I would dig up scathing reviews of my stuff on web sites back in the day. I used to be mad, and sometimes I wondered why I bothered to work on anything (much less give it away for free). Eventually though I decided that I needed to take all input — even the “angry anonymous coward” kind — and use it as fuel to improve whatever I could.