alt Hacker News>Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
This seems like a pet-peeve that's slipped through, because
1) It's really not; the FOSS developers never forced anyone to use their software, even if they're asking for payment for a product that was originally "marketed" as "free",
and
2) With the damage to society done by the work of many of the people in the tech industry and "respectable" white collar work in general, they should hope to be as virtuous as the window washers. Service done, pay for service, they go away and don't bother you for a while? No subscription shenanigans? Don't have to give them my credit card number? No annoying marketing emails? Not intentionally designing their service to be addictive? Geez. Adobe, Google, Facebook, Amazon employees make them look like saints. People give themselves way too much of a pass just because they sit in an air-conditioned office all day.
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One does wonder, if we'd gotten really used to the idea of paying for software, if advertising, and the resulting tracking that came from it, would have really taken off as much.
I have found not all open source to be the same in the modern era. The FOSS of yesteryear has been replaced by a lot of projects aimed at enterprise where the FOSS offering is the "free demo." This may have been novel and clever of the original pioneers of the practice, but there's a lot of cargo culting going on.
The worst offenders release the source but with gotcha licensing, wait for the enterprise to use it, then detect their usage and go in demanding payment or be sued. This happened to my team enough times to be a pattern.