I don't know, some people just don't get it I guess.

When you need free community support, you should post your query to a public forum, public irc channel etc. Via these public channels, you may or may not get a response. If you ask the right questions in the right channel, you'll probably do get a response. By right questions, you should ask beginner questions, in a beginner forum, and technical ones in technical forums.

If you think it's a bug, then file an issue. Almost all FOSS projects have one.

People don't mind responding to community support questions in a public forum because:

• The responses are public and archived, therefore answering one questions, will allow others to find it also. Therefore building and sharing community knowledge. Maybe others can join and help too.
• There is no requirement for any one person to respond.
• If you've contributed before to the community, the community will likely try help you in return.

You'll find that when I have free time, I'll be quite happy and friendly to help when I spend time reading public mailing lists or in public irc channel. This is a public channel though.

Firing random technical questions via direct email, IRC private message or IM however, is just plain rude and inconsiderate. Even more so, if you attach a long pastebin or logfile and expect a person to spend time looking at your problem. Unless somebody is explicitly maintaining a public project, and says to email problems within a certain scope, don't treat people like free individual hotline support for your random technical problems.

If you think about it more, you're asking somebody to spend time just for you (it's private, nobody else benefits), for free to solve a problem that's likely related to your job which you are already paid to do. Is the other person's time only meant to solve your problems?

Try this, get some random stranger to do a task for you for free. eg. changing your car engine oil. "Here's the oil, the car manual, I can't quite figure it out, can you do it?"

Situations that are acceptable, is if that person is employed or assigned to you in some way. Meaning you're that persons boss, or that person's client. Or maybe you're that person's parent. A local school maybe where that person is volunteering to help with the Linux setup.

So if want to ask a technical support question, keep it to the public forum. If you dont' get a response, check if you're in the right forum, but if not, don't go emailing privately the most active people in those forums.

If you want to always have immediate private and personal responses for solutions to your technical problems, you can do what everybody else does, which is to pay for support from individual consultants or commercial service provider.

Otherwise, ask the community (publicly) and the community is more likely to help you if they can:

http://foss.org.my/about-foss/support