I think to add to this.

If you're a fully employed professional of some means, which a huge amount of folk reading this are.

Pay for your shareware software. Usually with independent SaaS software, after I've used software for 6+ months or more, I pay for the lifetime license.

It's just polite.

It isn’t a bad thing. The repo is sarcastic in a good way, making fun of how we take incredible software for granted.

It got me to pay for Sublime even though I haven’t used it in years. When I used it, though, it was the best thing since sliced bread and more than paid for itself.

I don't have a problem with paying for software I use and like if the price and their terms are reasonable, which Sublime mostly is.

However, my personal issue with Sublime is the fact some basic requested editor functionality hasn't been implemented in years. You can see multiple such issues opened against it.

And I'm not talking about IDE-like stuff, just basic editor features, like having multiple rows of tabs when you have many files open.

I paid for it (and merge) even after I started using neovim full time, because I used it for years to learn to code before I got a paid job. Their license terms were kind enough to let me do that, so I honored the spirit of it and paid them once I got paid.

It's especially ironic on a forum where at least 90% of the userbase...writes software for a living.