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When I say free, I don't mean gratis.

> On the other hand, free software is (arguably) incompatible with being developer-respecting

If you mean developer-respecting as in "paid developer". That's not true. There are several ways of building a business around free software. Anyway, people releasing their software as free software do it willingly. That's strange to say that their software does not respect them.

> This is not compatible with the statement "developers should be paid"

No. As a developer, I chose to work for a company making money from free software. This company sells paid licenses for extensions (the code is free software, but people, especially enterprises, will pay for the convenience of having it built for them and installed from an easy-to-use UI), support, cloud hosting and customization.

I should restrict my statement however: end-user software should be free software. Not necessarily free beer. And if a customer wants non-free customization, that's fine with me. They are the ones who pay and use the software, under terms they outline in the contract they have with the company. Though I don't enjoy writing such non-free code if it could benefit others and will try to avoid this. That's a waste of my time, I'd rather have my time be spent on stuff that's useful for more people than just a customer whose values are not, by the way, necessarily totally aligned with mine. My company too, by the way. It encourages their customers to allow it to develop customization as open source components (by making a discount, and open source components are more likely to be maintained and get improvements outside this specific customer's contract - improvements can be paid by other customers needing them).

There are ways. Core WordPress and Nextcloud developers are paid too. That's true for many projects.

> If you truly believe no artist or creative person anywhere in the world ever deserves to be compensated for anything they do, well, I just really never want to live in the world you imagine.

There's no bad implication like people being locked up with a closed solution with non-free art. I'm not against it, though I have sympathy for people releasing art under a free license.

> There are several ways of building a business around free software.

For multiple orders of magnitude less opportunity than paid software. You think some internal business to business data processing software backed by hundreds of database tables and containing trade secrets works as an open source model? Because you said "software should be free." Period. And that's software. Those big Excel workbooks with thousands of formulas: that's software too. Internal ETL scripts, R scripts for data analysis: all software. None of that makes any sense as open source software. So what you're really saying is: internal company software should not exist. Trade secrets should not exist. A huge range of what millions of people do every day is unethical because you're not allowed to have a copy you can do whatever you want with. It's selfish and narrow-minded and harmful to our profession.

> Anyway, people releasing their software as free software do it willingly. That's strange to say that their software does not respect them.

I'm sure you can find many examples of people abandoning open source projects because they're not making enough to live on and their users are being toxic to them. You know exactly what I mean.

> I chose to work for a company making money from free software.

"I won the lottery, therfore everyone should quit their jobs and just buy lottery tickets." There is not enough opportunity in OSS for everyone to do this, unless you want 95%+ of developers to lose their jobs.

> end-user software should be free software. Not necessarily free beer.

This is an arbitrary destinction; anyone can be an "end user". And for end-user software to be free, all libraries it uses must also be free, so you've really only excluded ETL scripts here. And you can't have the "free speech" kind without the "free beer" kind.

Every single argument in favor of "all software everywhere should be OSS" has the same fallacy: here's six examples of OSS projects that make money, therefore all 23 million developers in the world can do it, and we will forever ignore all evidence to the contrary. It's unbelievably idealistic and narrow-minded.

> I won the lottery, therfore everyone should quit their jobs and just buy lottery tickets

Come on, it's very far from what I said. What's more, I'm not particularly lucky. Software companies are struggling to hire, including OSS ones. They are looking for people. It's not like lottery at all.

> So what you're really saying is: internal company software should not exist

I was saying something implying this. That was wrong. My rephrased claim includes internal company software. What's important for me is that the user of a program has control over it. A company has control over its internal software. I still think it would also be better if companies released their software when it can be generalized, so the wheel is not reinvented at every company. But people and companies should be free to write their own code for their own use and not release it.

What I'm against is programs for which the users don't have control on the code.

>> Anyway, people releasing their software as free software do it willingly. That's strange to say that their software does not respect them.

> I'm sure you can find many examples of people abandoning open source projects because they're not making enough to live on and their users are being toxic to them. You know exactly what I mean.

I know what you mean, and nobody deserves this, but this is not most open source projects. You were claiming OSS was incompatible with developer-respecting. That's a stretch. But that could hint that OSS is not enough, not that OSS is incompatible with developer-respecting. I'd argue entitled users are the issue here and as a society, we ought to do a better job of educating people not to be such assholes.

> On the other hand, free software is (arguably) incompatible with being developer-respecting, as TFA demonstrates. Software needs to be developer-respecting to thrive as well.

I labored, happily, for free[0] on blender’s dodgy old code with virtually no documentation and the only way to figure out the really tricky bits was hope someone was on IRC who could point you in the right direction. Hell, with half the user features I’d have to read the code to figure out what a particular button did.

Frickin’ nightmare — did I mention happily?

I like to believe the time I spent was worth it because I mostly worked on filling out the python API so other people could write fancy extensions, this was right after the transition to python 3 so somebody had to put in the time as the old system was way too dodgy to be kept.

If I just didn’t work on the things I did because blender didn’t respect me (whatever that means) I can give you a bunch of examples that the users/artists were able to build which wouldn’t be possible because the core devs didn’t have the time to go poking all around and figure out there’s no reason <whatever> couldn’t work. Just needed someone to ask the question and someone else to go find the answer.

Oh, and last I looked blender is thriving. I wish I still had time to hack on it because I really like the abuse.

[0] I did get a hand-tracking doodad for free from the results of this and my name in the credits of one of the movies so not completely without compensation.

> This is not compatible with the statement "developers should be paid". As a developer who would like to make a living, I obviously strongly disagree with this.

If everything is free, then no one has to pay for anything. But everything isn't free. Maybe a bunch of libraries are, but do the suits know how to stitch them together (or even read the documentation)?

And even if it was all free, do you think most people would have the background or patience to sift through it all and turn it into something productive?

Public library cards are free, do you see most people going to libraries and making the most of them?

Even if all software happened to be free, most people don't have the patience to read it. Hence we have people who get paid to read it and figure out what the fuck is going on