I think this kind of angry dialogue isn't helpful. It won't bring people closer to agreement.
But I don't think you can say "I made this thing, and gave it to you, so you can't criticize my actions regarding it".
The core team of an open source project control what code gets into it.
Some core team members are great programmers, or contribute a lot of time. Others are the real world friends or bosses of important team members.
It's not like you could get up tomorrow, go full time on Gnome project, and expect to be able to put this feature back in.
Regarding your 'I get nothing back, so go easy on me' point, this isn't always true.
On some open source projects, many of the biggest contributors are working on the project for a company, and use their influence to take it in the direction the company wants. They are being paid, and changing what the project is in return that. If I don't like those changes, I'm not sure your argument applies.
More generally, strong contributors to popular projects often consult or get jobs on the back of them.
I can see how this stream of complaints could be disheartening. But you do have power. You have been entrusted with other peoples work. I think being held to account (politely) is sort of fair enough.
Open sourcing it does not mean that other people are entitled to control it.
The developer in this case is part of a self appointed core team who have the keys to infrastructure bought with other peoples donations.
He has removed functionality written by someone else.
In neither case does this "it's my ball, don't tell me how to play with it" thing apply.
The wider problem-
Zooming out from this specific case, from open source projects to standards organizations, unelected cabals have a great deal of influence over what happens in technology.
Why is it important? Try this scenario - What if a key player at Mozilla (who got the position because his company bought them servers) decided to delete FTP support. Would that be okay?
Sure, we could fork Mozilla, add FTP back in. But if our fork didn't get much adoption, then it wouldn't make it into linux distributions, wouldn't have the manpower to merge in bugfixes from the mainline. It would fizzle, Chrome would drop it, then IE, and FTP would be gone from the world.
So these people do have power that the ability to fork doesn't nullify.
The community gives them power and resources (especially in the case of large projects where the project lead wrote less than 1% of the code). Can you really say they shouldn't be held to account for how they use them?
Gnome is not a throw-it-on-Github-and-see-if-it-sticks project. Development shouldn't happen in a vacuum, and antisocial behaviour shouldn't be the norm.
Well, thankyou for your work.
"I wake up every morning with around 50 e-mails of people complaining and criticizing something I devoted a lot of time to writing, while asking nothing in return."
OK, can you point to a Web page where you explain the scope, expected use cases and intended audience of your work? (perhaps then just set up an auto-responder with a link to the page)