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Comment by arpa | Hacker News Reader

You must really love software patents!

I hate them with a passion: do not mistake a question based on how the world seems to work for being happy with how the world works. If I use this, and it gets litigated out of existence, I'm right back to "okay so NOW what do I use?".

No it's not about patents and legalese. It's about human(e) attitude.

Christian Ghisler has been developing Total Commander for 27 years, since 1995. While he didn't invent the idea of two-pane file manager and more or less reimplemented Norton Commander in proper graphics-mode GUI, he added so much more to it over those three decades that it wouldn't be right to call it a copy of NC; moreover, he didn't ship it for free, he priced it at the same $49.

What the author of Copy, sorry, Double Commander does is pure and simple dumping. It's like standing next to a bakery and giving away same cakes for free. Does that feel right?

I wonder how the development of Double Commander is backed financially.

It is open source, free as in libre, EDIT and as in beer.

From https://doublecmd.github.io

>Double Commander is absolutely free <,comma> open source software.

Implies free as in beer as well, unless someone rubs my nose into the price stated somewhere on the website.

Do you have the same attitude towards, say, FreeCiv?

Not into games, but have the same sentiment towards Microsoft (with VSCode) and other companies and communities which give away software that all but clones commercial analogs while drawing profits off something else, effectively squeezing those who sell software for a living out of business.

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