Roderick and Dave,
Guys, great feedback from both of you.
So why am I so particularly pissed about this?
Well, it is funny you say "you get what you pay for"...sure, I understand that. To make it easier to deal with this aspect of our hobby that is also why I have donated/purchased the various sponsoring units in the past...w/o digging through my confirmation emails I honestly can not tell you how many times I've done that, nor which specific project or groups I supported, but I will tall you that I had ABSOLUTELY no problem trying to do my little 'part' of helping with the big picture.
I will say this, my contributions over the most recent couple of years have gone towards things such as:
1) OpenOffice
2) SystemLoad / RDesktop
3) NetDrive
4) PMView Pro
5) AN Device Driver Subscription
6) and various individuals: Unix ports or KO Myung-Hun's MPlayer to name a couple
Therefore, in short, my issue is not due to a proverbial "entitlement" some end-users at times exhibit, especially around Open Source projects, I do completely understand that. My issue instead is with what appears to be a very low level of "professionalism" I am encoutering, and it also does not happen to be a one-off example.
Silvan in fact is the very same person whom I exchanged several emails with just a little over 6 months ago regarding supporting/funding the team for the OpenOffice build...so to have him nearly have a "hissy fit" over my request in the ticket for detailed instructions just seems literally childish...
I just don't get it...if it's a matter of too many projects then he should pull out of the stuff he clearly can not support and either arrange for a smooth transition to someone else or simply state that something like PRM/YUM can not be maintained on the OS/2 platform. Heck, for those of us who chose to transition out of the old ZIP driven DLL bucket into the RPM/YUM thing it would at least create a more realistic picture of what we can and can not count on within this OpenSource model.
We should all be interfacing with each other in much better ways, especially in such a small community as our OS/2 group is today.