> We owe you nothing! And the fact that people still expect maintainers to work for them is really sad, IMHO.

Users also don't owe you anything either. Auto-closing reports without even looking at them is like asking for donations only to throw 90% of what you get straight into the trash. Not cool. If you don't want bug reports, state that up front or at least leave bugs open for other users to see and talk about. Otherwise, users are free to warn others to stay away from you and your projects.

And that's before getting into more complex issues like what responsibility you have if you take on maintenance of existing software and end up breaking something what was working perfectly for some users.

> Unlike corporate workers, nobody is measuring our productivity therefore we have no incentive to close issues if we believe they are unfixed.

There are plenty incentives, e.g. pride.

> That means that when we close the issue, we believe it has a high chance of being fixed, and also we weigh the cost of having many maybe-fixed open issues against maybe closing a standing issue, and (try to) choose what's best for the project.

That's fine, but bots that auto-close issues unless the reporter dances for them is the opposite of that.