Fair point—developers aren’t obligated to cater to users who don’t pay them. But in open-source, users choose to adopt software based on its relevance to their needs. If your code drifts too far from those needs or betrays core principles, people will start looking elsewhere. That’s not entitlement—it’s decentralization in action.
Look at Mozilla: Firefox didn’t fall because of bad engineering, but because they abandoned the principles that built user trust. The result? Gradual loss of relevance.
We’re not at that point with Bitcoin Core—but the growing number of users migrating to Bitcoin Knots should be a wake-up call, not something to dismiss.
Open-source thrives when devs and users stay in sync—ignore that, and alternatives will fill the gap.