Demanding everything be free and open source is important if you don't want independent developers to be able to make a living, and instead wish to create a world where the vast majority of software is controlled by big tech, who are the benefactors of "free" software. The less you're willing to pay people making good software, the more territory predatory ad/tracking-fueled "free" software gets. The more territory you give them, the more they're going to buy out open source software to destroy. We see this happening more and more recently, with uv, bun, vite etc. being bought out - if they can't put food on the table, they will sell out to monopolists.

I agree that I would never pay a subscription fee for any kind of system functionality, but there is a lifetime purchase option available, so there is no grounds to critique that here. Having extra payments models available in addition to a regular purchase model does not make a product worse.

I made a very good living developing open source software for more than a decade. Nothing about open source software precludes one from making money, it's just a different business model from closed source.

A business model that supports a tiny fraction of the market. To the extent there is money in FOSS, even then most of it is provided by the funding of big tech (a whole host of some of the most widely-used FOSS, like Linux, LLVM, Go, Rust, C#, Typescript, VSCode, React, are all obviously corporate-backed). Independent developers who can make a living selling FOSS exist, but are absolutely on the fringe.

Yeah, but I didn't do that. I think I really did mean "little tool" here. This (likely) just isn't the right scale for a pay-to-play project. Obsidian kind of figured this out, but my gut is that this thing is too small.

i bought it for like 4 bucks several months ago. for the price (and subscription tier) i'm seeing now, i wouldn't say it's worth it.