"Public shaming" of someone who's been as productive and generous with his open-source work as Ashkenas is never appropriate.
Respectfully disagree on the particulars, sure, but don't imply that someone who's given you a gift now owes you extra work, when their own design sense – the same thing that created the shared bounty – guides them otherwise.
People should also consider that authors of popular projects are inundated with support requests and demands for their time, and have to set some boundaries on their efforts, which may appear callous to outsiders. If his boundary here is not wanting to embrace Semantic Versioning, respect it, and fork/migrate/workaround rather than whine/shame/guilt.
Respectfully disagree on the particulars, sure, but don't imply that someone who's given you a gift now owes you extra work, when their own design sense – the same thing that created the shared bounty – guides them otherwise.
People should also consider that authors of popular projects are inundated with support requests and demands for their time, and have to set some boundaries on their efforts, which may appear callous to outsiders. If his boundary here is not wanting to embrace Semantic Versioning, respect it, and fork/migrate/workaround rather than whine/shame/guilt.