Hi !
You're right on most of the topic, but wrong in one place, which is quite hard to evaluate : you may feel that you don't owe a second to a guy which does not pay you for your time on a particular software ... but maybe you owe this guy hours, because you are currently using this guy's work to code, deploy or compile your software, or maybe he is working on the linux kernel, or apache server, or any other part of the free software ecosystem which you actually use everyday, flawlessly, because of the hours he spent on these other parts you rely on.
I really have the same feeling as yours about all this, but when, as a free software developer, I send a bug report to a guy, with the solution to fix the problem, and get an answer like "I'm not here for your tech support, just go away" ... then I feel like the problem is much more complex, as I did not even ask for support (already had fixed the problem on my side), but provided support to this guy, who was so self centered that he was not even able to see it.
We have built a community, which relies on time sharing. That's not the best solution, agreed, but should we change this, then the whole community collapses.
Finding a better approach is nowhere close to easy.
Should we evaluate the time spent by each dev, evaluate this time's value, and create a system where every user should buy time credits to be distributed to all the devs ? Who evaluates ? how ? And would you pay for the time credits of all the free software you are using everyday whithout even noticing ?
I feel like in a perfect world there should be a better solution. In the actual one, the actual solution is not that bad.
But should you find a better one, I would be glad to give it a try :)
What you point to is the lack of record-keeping in a gift-based economy. That in turn makes it easier to freeload, especially when the population is large enough that you don't recognize everyone and thus don't know what someone's reputation is.
I may well be more inclined to spend time on a bug fix from a kernel developer, but I know only 2 kernel developers by name (Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox) out of the several thousand that have worked on the kernel. But at the same time, most kernel developers these days are paid to work on the kernel by their employers. They've already been compensated for their work to improve the commons. Volunteer coders haven't.
Given the venue I'm sure someone is going to jump in and yell "blockchain" here. :-) Who knows, maybe. I don't believe it's a silver bullet but it could be useful in some form.
It is certainly nice and benevolent to accept bug fixes that are offered on a silver platter; I would hope most if not all Open Source developers do so most of the time. However, that is different from it being an obligation.
Forming a gift-economy is hard enough. Creating it inside a money-based economy is even harder, because the good karma of gift giving may feel nice but, as the saying goes, "that and a fair card will get you on the subway." I can't buy groceries with good karma.
Until we have some clear, concrete way to convert good karma into groceries I stand by my statement that the status quo is abusive. And yes, that is that bad.
If the whole system collapses if we remove volunteer abuse, then the whole system deserves to collapse.