Comment by chrysoprace
3 hours ago
In that case the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything. If somebody depends on the maintainer's package for a critical component then they should consider paying them and possibly drawing up an explicit contract. That's what we did at my work for a critical open source component, where we paid the maintainer to add several features we needed.
It's commendable that your organization did this.
But...
> the maintainer needs to have some self-restraint and accept that they don't owe them anything.
Assumes (especially in cases where "maintainer == original author" psychological capabilities that simply might not exist in the maintainer.
I don't know of a good way to deal with this, other than to be kind and try to notice potential signs of impeding burn-out before an implosion.