I'd say the opposite is true, you can put content behind a paywall in one place, even if it is freely (libre and/or gratis) available elsewhere. Wikipedia has a page called "List of public domain resources behind a paywall" [1], this seems a nice example. To me Ardour binaries are another.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_domain_resource... .
Are the sunflowers "behind a paywall" in any functional sense? Does the fact that one possible place to get them requires payment mean anything when they are available at no cost elsewhere?
The functional sense seems very relative. For people who cannot go further, all sunflowers are behind a paywall. For people who can, it’s just that, i.e. they also have access to sunflowers not behind a paywall.
To be clear, I’d say the resident on the left (or Ardour for that matter) is in no way worse because they’re offering paid sunflowers. They have every right to do so. And something must be good about their offer if people are buying from them (location, authority, desire to support their business, perhaps all of the above).
The Ardour "paywall" does not do that.
You may not like the "cost" of the alternative (e.g. finding someone else who already has the Windows version, or learning to build it yourself, or getting someone else to build it for you), but those costs are, I would claim, not part of the "paywall".
If you had said "ardour.org doesn't offer ready-to-run binaries unless you pay something for them", I would not even have commented.
You're saying "oh, well, they don't provide no-charge downloads, so it's paywalled" is a comment that to me basically ignores what makes libre software libre software.