What were people doing based on that assumption? The article says contacting the author to ask for a fix over bug trackers, Twitter, etc is still ok in their mind. What else were people doing?
"Ask for a fix" is euphemism what often happens. It's commonplace to receive reports to the tune of:
* "Can we get an ETA on this? Some of us need to get real work done"
* "How you can justify leaving out such a basic feature?"
* "This project is unusable without this feature"
* "Why waste people's time by releasing software with bugs like this"
* "This kind of mistake is totally unprofessional"
* "The developers must not have the skill to fix this"
These sorts of interactions can be more exhausting than outright abuse, because they're designed to bait/provoke the developer rather than just insult them. And to be clear, this isn't particular to this developer. There was a whole study done on this that made the rounds awhile back[1].
