throwaway4799

I don't think I was in any way abusing. I said that your attitude does not inspire goodwill or good sentiments. You're trying to make money, like everyone. That's fine, not everyone is a monster for not writing free software, giving to charity, whatever. I just don't see why you should feel entitled to make the money the way you're attempting to. Your userbase feels strongly about some issues and these are the same people you're trying to convince to give them money to you. Calling them fundamentalists will not help or solve anything, and I can't emphatize with "If only more of my users agreed with me so I could make more money".

Linux is quite spread already. It is present on billions of Android devices, holds a quasi-monopoly on supercomputers, a large majority of servers and a quite fair chunks of embedded systems.

"But it doesn't run games or Excel on my desktop!" Ah yes you're right. Guess Linux is niche and needs spreading after all.

Are you implying that the author is so much reliant on this specific business model that they would likely end up homeless and starving to death if they were deprived of it?

Free labor is distinct from free software and it is misleading to conflate the two. Plenty of people are paid to work on free software, and I'm not talking about Red Hat or SUSE either. See: 90% of the Linux kernel contributors.

As for musicians, plenty of them share their music (or flps, or whatever) all the time. Soundcloud, bandcamp, jamendo, magnatune, soulseek... the list goes on.

No one is entitled to a business model. If your userbase has a culture of being (rightfully, in my opinion) defiant toward proprietary products, that's for you to remedy. If you can't make any money from ancilliary uses of your product (support, hosting, whatever) maybe you should question why you're monetizing in the first place.

Free software is strictly more ethical than nonfree software. Any attempt at arguing otherwise basically boils down to a rationalization of 'but I want to make money', which is not a tenable ethical stance. I'm not saying it's wrong per se, but it doesn't inspire goodwill or good sentiments either. Trying to deride people with a strong sense of ethics regarding software production and use by comparing them to religious fanatics is misguided as best, malicious at worst.

You're literally wrong. Intellectual property can't be stolen by definition. You're probably referring to copyright infringement which is a completely different thing from theft, whose application is completely different from country to country and is not sentenced the same way.

You're right. That's why no one ever makes anything in China. In fact, no one makes anything ever if they don't have the byzantine American copyright system to back them up.