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by mherrmann 2767 days ago
I had the same experience numerous times. It's great OP is standing up to this.

When I'm attacked for writing non-free software, I now respond by linking to https://fman.io/blog/dear-comrade/.

2 comments

The link is completely irrelevant to the topic. The topic is libre software versus proprietary. The link defends paid software against gratis, or at least misleadingly conflates both aspects.
You did read the section "Maybe you also dislike the fact that my project is not open source" right?
Yes, it's a small part that provides "I think I can't make it" as the only argument. That doesn't really bring anything into the discussion.
That's another of these developers who benefited greatly from FLOSS, yet write condescending posts. Ironically, the author of fman makes use of Qt, which is a great example of how to make a business and still have a copyleft licensed codebase.
I write to defend myself when I dare (gosh!) to write proprietary software.
My problem isn't with you writing proprietary software, (I'd prefer if it wasn't proprietary, but do you as you wish). My problem is with you people who benefit daily from FLOSS to then act as if the FLOSS people are just crazy hippie, commie lunatics and how you couldn't possibly be FLOSS without also putting food on the table and how other people are apparently not (gosh!) allowed to advocate for not using proprietary software, or how is wrong for them to do so and other such garbage.
Before, you said "completely irrelevant", now you say "small part". Which is it?

The article mentions and thus applies to both libre vs proprietary and gratis vs paid. And it is definitely meant to apply to both.

As I said, it has a small part mentioning open source, which is still completely irrelevant with its weak argument. I'm not sure what the author is getting at, but it seems they treat open source as gratis, which comes back to the fact that gratis is not the topic here.
That completely ignores the belief that proprietary is unethical and immoral. 'I can't do the things I want without doing X' is not a compelling counterargument to 'X is unethical.'