tl;dr: negative people can suck all the joy out of software development, particularly when doing the less enjoyable parts such as support&#x2F;bug fixes for free.  The author has some suggestions, but I think they work best for larger projects.<p>I&#x27;ve related this before, but I&#x27;ve had some super negative experiences with very entitled people.  One person was a professor for whom I continued to build stats software for 18 months after leaving university.  He actually repeatedly called me screaming when I was too busy to do some custom work for him on his timeframe.  After giving him 10+ hours a week of free work for a year and a half because I thought the software was interesting and I believed in the work the various labs were doing.<p>I also work on a bit of open source software that I wrote that implements a high performance (threaded and heavily beaten on with vtune) ml algorithm.<p>I think the solution, particularly for small projects or individuals, is to preemptively cut people off.  After many negative experiences, when I get bug reports or requests, if the reporter hasn&#x27;t put in a reasonable amount of work already, I just killfile the email address and move on with my life.  Even a small fraction of negative people was ruining any interest I had in working on my project: I&#x27;d open the tag in gmail, read a nasty or demanding email, and lose all motivation.<p>If people don&#x27;t preemptively respect my time, I have no use for them.  If they don&#x27;t like that, they can have a full refund of everything they&#x27;ve paid me =P