>> This was two years ago and I think I'd be over it by now.

The more I think about it, this was written for marketing purposes. He doesn't really make a point. It just draws more attention to the product.

I tend to agree. There is suddenly a flash, 50% off sale on the hiri website that wasn't there earlier this morning before this link hit the HN front page.

There's no sudden flash sale. This has been there for about a year now.

No coincidence that this is literally the first time I've heard of his product.

I'm founder of the company and I wrote the post. I wrote it because despite a lot of negative comments our experience going to Linux has been a good one. Yet the 'fundamentalists' I mention tend to make proprietary vendors feel unwelcome. I believe this is bad for Linux. IMO a vocal minority are actively preventing Linux from expanding.

Considering the lack of support with firmware and other things I would say the relationship is negative on both ends. I find it a positive thing that they openly decide to prefer FLOSS for the fact that it can open up to better end user experiences given interest even if most of it has been mainly for developers.

As for non-free I find it awkward since most of the time one would have to bend over backwards to support it (e.g NixOS with steam) or adopt external package management systems (Snap, etc) which only add complexity. It also reduces trust as we can't verify builds are in fact not tampered with and so on. If we avoid snap, nix, and guix for packaging then we must rely on upstream updating to ensure it won't break upon the next upgrade where we could have just compiled otherwise. This is inconvenient.

So, in my view I find it positive that there is a push for companies to open source when supporting GNU/Linux as it creates a much better experience for package maintainers, users, and the company involved while increasing the general reach of FLOSS software to other platforms (BSD, Plan9, ..).