In the twenty-five or so years of the free-software movement, we've built the Internet and the World-Wide Web; made the Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete by producing something dramatically better; built history's most portable operating system, which now runs everything from most smartphones to most supercomputers, with contributions from hundreds of companies, including its biggest competitors, IBM and Microsoft.

But even after twenty-five years, there are still people who think they have to make a code base proprietary to make money on it.

I'm horrified.

What do you think will happen if you toss together a contacts manager or to-do list app and charge a monthly fee, and give out all the code, just as the Meteor devs have given out all their code to you? Maybe some of your users will decide to run the app on their own server and stop paying you. Or try to compete with you. But probably most of them will want to use the site operated by the app's primary developer. And all of your would-be competitors are just free R&D increasing the value of your site.

What's so terrible about making web apps that are free software?