In reply to Ron.

This dev attitude of “it’s free so you’re lucky if you get support” is really tiring to me.

That's really an unfair response to plugin developers, and open-source software developers in general.

The fact is, open-source software is given as a free gift, as-is...people are free to use it or not. Developers have absolutely zero obligation to users to provide support. To have a feeling that you are entitled to support, when you didn't pay anything for something, is a bit misguided, don't you think?

The reason that plugin authors and other FOSS developers are not obligated to provide support is simple math. It's simply not possible.

Takayuki is one man. He isn't saying that he won't try to provide some support, but that he simply can't respond to every single request. the fact he does at all, says a lot. Take a look the the plugin's stats. 40+ million downloads, and 1+ million active installs. The active installs is the important number. It's probably many times that as I don't think WordPress[.]org updates that number once it passes a million. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) How would it even be practical to provide one-on-one support for that many people?

Do the math for a second... If even only 1% of CF7's users need support each year (which is really good), that's still over 10,000 support requests per year. From it's support forum page it looks like there have been 720 support threads in the last two months...That's approximately 4,320 per year. So, let's just say the number is somewhere between that and the 10,000. Just for argument's sake, let's use 5,000. If a plugin author spends 30 minutes per support request, that's 2,500 hours just doing support. There are only 2080 work hours in a year, so it would take 1.2 years to respond to all those requests.

That's not taking into account that the plugin author is not getting paid for any of that time. It also doesn't take into account that the plugin author needs to earn a living and have a life.

So, why again, does it bother you that plugin authors are not obligated to provide support? You might want to trade places for a moment and see it from their perspective.

FOSS has a lot of benefits over paid software. Not in every case, but definitely with WordPress plugins. We have found more bad code in premium plugins than in popular free plugins on WordPress[.]org. (Obviously there are exceptions.) There is little accountability in paid plugins and they aren't required to follow WordPress coding standards, so they often don't. Open source plugins can be analyzed by anyone, and everyone, so security issues get discovered much more quickly as well.

So, when plugin developers say that they are not obligated to provide support, they're not saying they don't give a damn about their users. Many do...and they provide support even though they don't have to. People just need to have realistic expectations.

If someone gives you something, you don't go and demand more from them...you say, "Thanks!" That's just basic respect.