I applaud his approach, at it demonstrates respect to other developers by explicitly communicating what others can expect of him. Although it's not required, I would hope that all devs who open source a project without any intention of heeding public issue trackers follow suit and proactively clarify that intention.
(Nothing--philosophically or legally--requires anyone to maintain an issue tracker for an open source project. There was a time when open source typically amounted to a tarball on an FTP server, and maybe a -dev list.)
Yes, but those were also the days when it was super painful to contribute to OSS.
The issue tracker can also be used as a roadmap / task manager which is very helpful. The problem isn't the issue tracker. The problem is the developer does not want to maintain everything for everyone. That is perfectly okay so the solution to me is just to communicate that in the project guidelines. To me, not having an issue tracker at all is equivalent to Sublime Text developers dropping off the map for 6 months.
(Nothing--philosophically or legally--requires anyone to maintain an issue tracker for an open source project. There was a time when open source typically amounted to a tarball on an FTP server, and maybe a -dev list.)