> That's a bad-faith dilemma, you know it.

No it isn't, it is the reality. It's perfectly fine for you to say you don't pay for your tools, but don't be surprised to see them funded by VCs instead of donations from multiple backers if it is useful enough.

> The users can want to see it maintained without necessarily having the money, userbase or motivation to sponsor the lead dev. It's not criminal to have a tight pocketbook, and that's why free devtools succeed while paid ones rot. There will be always be a FOSS version of Herdr, and thanks to vibe coding it will probably retain feature parity with the paid version.

You understand both can rot without enough donations / backers? There are free (as in libre) software that has tens or hundreds of backers (Mastodon, ffmpeg, curl, OBS and Blender) and they are not VC backed.

Even when there is a FLOSS version of Herdr, it will run into the same funding issues (Herdr was FLOSS software). What we do know is that open source maintainers do not get paid enough for maintaining their projects [0] [1].

So the smaller but useful popular projects usually running on less backers, are more likely to spin-off and turn to VC funding anyway.

> Everyone is happier with this arrangement, you're one of the only ones fulminating at the outcome.

Except for the lead developer / maintainer.

> Clearly he's content releasing the software for free. Let me guess, you're going to complain that the free market "forced" him to work without pay?

You seem to be still confused with was was "free" here. He already released the software as libre software, but it is the maintenance of the software that is never free. There are already examples of FLOSS software that has hundreds of backers, even when it is released for $0.

Again, another thing HNers don't seem to understand or care about.

[1] https://www.sonarsource.com/open-source-maintainer-survey-20...

[0] https://assets-eu-01.kc-usercontent.com/ef593040-b591-0198-9...