Do you find you have much success motivating people when you use this tone of voice?

I reported this issue in February. Others have reported it before I did. What is Composer's response? Silence and negligence while its maintainers go to cons and drink beer.

Their priorities are totally fucking backwards.

I would strongly advise using less inflammatory titles than Horrendously Stupid and Ill-Advised Install Instructions if you wish people to not ignore you.

You might not want to do this, and that's fine and your prerogative.

If you do want to see a significant increase in cooperation, dropping the attitude will be a quick and effective way of doing so.

You pointed out a valid concern, a few people kicked the tyres of it, and when it turned out that the fix entails a good deal of work - something you've skipped over - you decided to become "rude."

My goal is to fix the problem

As I said, your current method of trying to get it fixed plainly isn't working.

If you start and end at the same place (i.e. nothing gets done), the only difference being that you've made people want to actively avoid you, is that a good result for you?

That's all I need to know - good work!

(They have an auto-updater now, and I'm working on making it verify signatures in a future releases.)

One of the advantages of open source is that you have the freedom to take the code and fix issues that concern you.

You can Google "open source" for more information - that might be a more productive use of your time than waiting for people who owe you nothing to make changes that you want.

However, it makes very little sense for them to, for example, merge a PR if it uses my public key for verification and not theirs. The problem I'm running into is that I can't just fix the issue without their cooperation.

Regardless, this is all moot because the Composer maintainer is now communicating with me privately to discuss how to fix the problem so it will be solved some day soon.