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Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

The heart of the matter is that a fairly small number of people on a proprietary UNIX are mad that they have to pay money to continue to be free riders on the Free Software movement.

Mr Fleischer has done a huge amount of unpaid work so a narrow segment of wealthy software workers can avoid the choice between paying for proprietary software and supporting Free Software, after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system

No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”

If you wanted a Free Software FUSE, maybe a Linux desktop would have been a better choice?

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> after spending thousands of dollars on a MacOS system

Note how much the developer also pays in hardware and in subscriptions like the Apple Developer account.

Apple does not give free certificates for open source projects. Everybody must pay!

It’s not like those things are useless outside of the context of this project.

A paid Apple Developer account just to sign an open-source license is pretty useless.

I fail to see how that is in any way the heart of the matter. The articles mentions someone being mad completely in passing, in a quoted tweet. If anyone in this HN thread is mad, they're a tiny minority because I haven't seen any.

Instead it seems more like the heart of your comment is that you view everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else. So when you came upon an article and HN thread calmly discussing a maintainer's decision to change their project's license for understandable reasons but in a somewhat underhanded way, you immediately sorted everyone into heroes and villains and self-righteously took a stand.

> "you immediately sorted everyone into heroes and villains and self-righteously took a stand"

And when you proclaim that this person "views everything in terms of an ideological battle between the Free Software movement and everyone else", would you say that's a more nuanced and balanced take on the matter?

Would I say what is a more balanced take on what matter? The two quotes you pulled appear to be takes on different matters.

They might seem to be, so let me explain: To me it looked like you were doing exactly what you accused the other poster of -- immediately sorting them into the 'villain' bin and taking a self-righteous stand against them.

Interesting. To me, calling people "calm" doesn't sound particularly heroic, nor does calling someone "self-righteous" sound particularly villainous when I don't suggest they did any harm. Being harmlessly self-righteous may be embarrassing, perhaps, but hardly villainous.

By contrast, "free riders", "huge amount of unpaid work [for] wealthy software workers", "No world has ever produced a violin small enough to play an elegy for those “victims.”"—I don't think I addressed my parent in remotely approaching that much disdain.

HN's obsession with Apple means you're getting down voted. But you're not wrong.

If I were to downvote it (which I have not done, to be clear) I’d do so because it’s only very tangentially related.

OSS means allowing "free riders"

How is the software ‘Free’ if that freedom depends on your choice of OS or hardware? Free software is allowed to be used by anyone for any purpose.

Becayse you're free to take the existing source code and adapt the software to work with your choice of OS and hardware. There is no requirement for free software to support every platform in existence out of the box.

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