alt Hacker NewsThe broader discussion but especially this little exchange reminds me of a similar situation with Ubuntu.
At one point they were the darling of the desktop Linux space and much beloved by an online community of highly principled people who didn't pay them anything.
Those same people then utterly blasted them when they tried a few monetization/promotion features that fell flat, like the Amazon lens in Unity. I had no love for that lens but it was easy to remove.
Shuttleworth gave a fairly telling interview afterwards which basically amounted to "Fuck these guys, you can never make them happy."
Canonical proceeded to focus on the server side where there's more money, fewer loud freeloaders, and now they're somewhat more evil.
There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
I think you have to accept that no company is going to get it 100% perfect and if you're too loud, annoying, and you're not giving them anything in return, they may just take their ball and go home.
Being the company that does the right thing is arguably not worth it, the devil's advocate argument is, some guy online is going to ride you even harder because you said you were trying to do the right thing, so better to stay quiet, or even cultivate an air of vague evil instead, then they won't bother.
Perhaps also related: the idea that riots are stupid, because rioters are inevitably protesting someone/something that's far away, even as they set fire to local businesses owned by members of their own community.
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If no company can make a fully free and user respecting browser then Mozilla the foundation should dissolve Mozilla the corporation because it doesn't fit into the state goals of the foundation.
> There is also a whole strain of thought in SaaS which says don't ever have a free version because those guys always end up being the biggest complainers.
Not just free, but also cheap. I have found the less someone pays the higher the likelihood they are a problem customer.
Ubuntu freeloaded on Debian so its fairly reasonable to consider the ubuntu skin to not be worth having if the result is advertisements being pushed onto users.
Companies that want to freeload on a free software community will always have a hard time. They may be praised in the beginning if they bring fresh and new energy, but trust is only going to work for so long until the "monetization features" starts being pushed. Historically that only works if the company reforms the original in such a way that it essentially is a completely different thing. Ubuntu today is still just a skin over Debian that users can easily replace.
Accidentally the best thing Ubuntu brought to Debian was the release schedule, which the Debian community adapted. Without that advantage there isn't much point to Ubuntu unless Canonical continuously pour a lot of money and developer time for free into the ecosystem. A lot of people commented at the time that such a thing wasn't sustainable.