Comment by geofft
5 years ago
While I don't disagree with you, the problem the author is saying is that end users don't realize that, and contact the author directly even when they are using an out-of-date package from a distribution, and the author doesn't have an immediate way to determine whether the problem is with their code at the version they released, or an older packaged version.
While it's technically true that a free software author owes nothing to any of their users, it's a legitimate problem that there's no good way to selectively offer help and support to those getting the software directly but not to those getting it from a package.
It used to be that distro users did indeed open bugs against their distro, and then the distro package maintainer would triage them and forward them upstream as necessary.
I don't know when precisely that stopped happening. Perhaps when OSS became more commonly hosted on sites like GitHub that have more easily-approachable issue trackers, users became more savvy about talking to upstream directly.