Comment by sgarland

Of course it’s OK to be paid for your work; I don’t think anyone reasonable is saying otherwise. RMS even has no problem with it [0] (though he does take issue with the term open source, so there’s that).

Here’s my take on “the open source philosophy,” having benefited from it since the 90s. Note, I am not nearly as much of a zealot as RMS, and have no strong opinion on GPL vs BSD style licensing; use whichever meets your needs and future plans.

If I had needed to pay for a Linux distribution as a kid, it’s unlikely I would have been able to explore it.

If I was unable to figure out software behavior by studying its source code, I would have many unanswered questions today, and Debian’s vixie-cron would likely still have an obscure bug [1].

I, like practically all people in the tech industry, owe a great deal to people who have given their time to various projects. Some of those people make a living out of it (Daniel Stenberg, for example), but also still offer their software gratis. Therefore, I feel a moral obligation to do so in return.

0: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019716