There is this conventional wisdom that a lawyer is not really your lawyer until it is you who is paying them. I think it has much broader application and you want to be paying for technology. It is naive to think you can accept services of say Facebook, not pay a dime for it and assume it is all done in your best interests.
- software is copyable for free
- contributing to open source doesn’t make the developers your agents like paying a lawyer does
It does not matter if there is zero cost to copying the software.
What matters is that somebody put an effort into doing something and now they are seeing lots of people using it for free. It is in human nature to try to benefit from it and most people have a mental model that they deserve to be compensated for doing something beneficial to another.
Most people are not seeing incremental cost of adding another user (effectively zero or non zero), what they are seeing is total cost of producing the software divided by the number of users. Then they see that some users are paying and some users are not.
And? pfsense uses thousands of packages that they don't pay for either, that's the spirit of open source, I can't understand who post this on HN without understanding it.
@dang: Can we ban these comments? Lately they arrive like clockwork and bring very little to the comments, especially since it doesn't seem to be talking about anyone here.
edit: at the time of this comment I can't find any top post complaining like the OP is describing.
You are miss-understanding what open source means. It doesn't mean everything has to be free. Many companies are built on top of open source software which allows them to do exactly that in their license. You also don't know if pfsense sponsors packages or contributes code to the packages they are using.
It's the right of every open source software author to continue working on their software privately under a different license, and that's exactly what happened here.
Just because you are not happy that you don't have access to their software for free any more doesn't mean it's against the open source spirit.
Yep, and nobody had any qualms about it in this thread, which is why I find such posts to be tiresome to read.
> Just because you are not happy that you don't have access to their software for free any more doesn't mean it's against the open source spirit.
This is exactly what I'm complaining about, I never said I wasn't happy.
I personally use Netgate 6100 with pfSense+ which I find extremely capable device for my very complex home network setup. I understand, with a free pfSense you can take a cheap Chinese PC and make it into quite powerful and flexible router. And you still can do that, pfSense is still available just without some extra features.
So imagine your uncle is voluntarily paying your electricity bill to help you out. One day, he decides to gradually pay less and less of your bill.
Should you be angry at the uncle? Or should you understand you should be grateful for all the years of electricity bills he paid and recognise it is his choice to stop paying for them and you should not take it against him? Be a grownup