Comment by palata

> This is the attitude that made me keep my patches to myself.

That's your choice. Now if you open source your patches (in a fork, or in PRs to the upstream repo), someone other than the maintainer could benefit from it. So it's still helpful.

> If you make your project public, it means you want and expect people to use it

No. I benefit from others open sourcing their code, so I open source mine when I can. Because if nobody does it, then I don't benefit from it. But I don't care if people use it or not.

> You could at least write some documentation, so I don't waste my time

No. You are responsible for your time. If it takes you days to realise that you struggle understanding what my project does, that's on you. I am not responsible for you wasting days.

> If you set up a bug tracker, then at least have the decency to answer bug reports.

No. If you report a bug there, it can be useful to someone other than the maintainer, so it's still worth it.

> but at least you could give

I gave you a whole project that you apparently find useful, and all you have to say about it is "at least I could give more"?

> If you open it up to pull requests, it means you want people to contribute

No! Again a PR is a way to share a patch. Even if the maintainer never even looks at it, it may be useful to someone else.

> If you can't do at least these things, just say it's abandoned on the front page and be done with it.

I added a licence that explains what you should expect. I don't know of a single popular open source licence that sets any of the expectations you have. All they say is that you can reuse the code under some conditions.