[forsaken]

This attitude is one of the largest problems with open source in my opinion. If people want to try and make money on software, it is their option. It's free for non-commerical use, and the most enlightened thing you could say is "eww"?

People need to eat, and writing open source software to provide for themselves seems like a much better model than doing it for free in their spare time off from some proprietary coding job.

[cschmidt]

Exactly, $45 or $150 is not exactly going to break the bank for a commercial venture. If it is something you need, and it saves you a couple of hours of time, then you're ahead.

[obviouslygreen]

Agreed. This kind of Stallman-esque hard line towards charging for [insert arbitrary software component here] is short-sighted and, often, hypocritical (most people who aren't being paid to work on software don't care about this enough to argue about it).

People who live and work outside of academia (and, lately, inside of it as well) for long enough eventually figure out that this perspective is naive. It just takes a while to lift your perspective far enough to see a larger part of the picture.

[kingkilr]

I don't think you know much about Richard Stallman. He has no problem with people charging for software, indeed a right to commercial use is one of the fundamental software freedoms he enumerates.

[FooBarWidget]

Ironically, many Free Software/open source "supporters" are more hypocritical than Stallman. The thing that these people care most about is that the software is gratis. When it is not gratis but still open source (this is possible given the Free Software and Open Source definitions) these people scream fire and murder.

[jordigh]

In fact, he recommends that you charge for software.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

[zalew]

RMS is not against selling software, he supports it. Free(dom) Software is ethic licensing, it doesn't have anything to do with taking money for work.

[d23]

I actually kind of like it when I see an author charging these days. It tells me they spent enough time working on it that they consider it worth charging for. It also leads me to think (rightly or wrongly) that there will be updates for it in the future, which I also like.