"It’d be a shitty, reduced, pale imitation of what Sparrow actually was, because the developers would have had to take so much time off to attend the funerals of their families who had died from starvation."

I mean, throwing hypothetical come backs was bad enough but mixing uncalled for low blows to GPL really tops it off for me. This clueless person believes GPL is "shitty" by definition... what a lovely special snow flake intelect we got here, moving on. Make sure to miss the contribute button on his about page, he probably put it on there for sarcastic stance.

I think the guy is pretty spot on. There is a difference between feeling bad ("man this is an awesome app, it sucks I might have to find a replacement and port all my data") and the very real sense that a lot of the more vocal complainers seem to think their 10 dollars purchase earned them the indentured servitude of the Sparrow team.

He addresses just that. Feeling bad is one reaction, feeling betrayed and entitled to limitless updates of an app that you like is something totally different.

I haven't seen a single person being entitled or saying that they deserved more from Sparrow. People are upset because Sparrow is being abandoned, and "rights" or what you "deserve" has nothing to do with it. Creating a blog post attacking fake "my rights!" arguments is just silly.

I've seen quite a lot of people saying that. The author quotes several in his article. If people were merely upset, that would be one thing. But people are talking as if they deserve updates and new features.

I couldn't find any quotes expecting endless updates without paying more. The author is wrong in his approach either way. Looking at each issue in isolation. He also incorrectly accounts for the cost to the user. It's not just $10. It's also the time invested into learning the software, setting it up, etc.

He also makes a bunch of assumptions (of course they asked google about open sourcing, but google said no for example) and also skips over other serious problems (things sparrow said they were working on for the future).

Sorry, but this article is pretty bad.

Really? This is the very first quote he has in the article:

"Sparrow OWE me new features, since when you're buying a software produced by a startup, you're also supporting the development."

Dude, I could barely read the whole post through. It feels like he just HAD to respond to the rage against his tweet. I suppose he felt his manhood was at stake. He couldn't sound more of a douchebag with this phrasing really. Go on, phrase titles and respond to yourself then.

This is not the quality of posts I usually find on the front page of Hacker News.