Dear JavaScript
I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github &quot;issues&quot; that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn&#x27;t available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn&#x27;t understand (or didn&#x27;t read) the README. None of the people that posted this stuff appeared to have ever contributed to that project (or any project), but thought they were entitled to what were essentially support requests or re-tasking of developers to meet their demanded schedule.<p>Our discussion eventually thought it was due to two things: 1) Github, while making the open source process visible and easy to use for many, also makes the process pretty open and barrier free to people who may not yet have the technical (or social) ability to meaningfully contribute to a project; what once would have required posting to a dev mailing list is now just a couple of clicks; and 2) a cultural mindset that some people seem to have that free or open source software is some kind of entitlement (or at least due to communication issues, and the ambiguity of the written word on the Internet that is how I thought it came off). I think the sheer volume of freely available amazing software has caused some to forget the whole reason we have this stuff is someone somewhere spent a lot of time working on it and then decided to give it away.<p>I don&#x27;t know if this is really a javascript thing, but I think it manifests itself there more than others simply because javascript might be the first place a lot of people start in their career&#x2F;learning.