The fundamentalist FOSS mentality

> Super! So we should Open Source Hiri tomorrow. And I would love to. But there is a serious problem with this argument. If we do Open Source Hiri, there is nothing to stop someone from forking it and selling it for less /offering it for free. We die.

Sorry, but it seems you don't know the landscape at all if this is truly your honest opinion. Open source companies making a profit and not being forked to death is not a new thing.

I can name almost every profit-making OSS project/organization ever to counter this. is open source, why are they still going strong, making money? Why has their project not been forked and sold for less?

It's not that simple in practice. As projects grow in size they require paid manpower to be competitive in terms of features, security, bugs fixed, etc, and implementation speed. While in theory projects can be, and in practice are forked all the time, they are rarely forked and undersold in the manner you fear, and if attempted, they will quickly lag behind your project if they don't have the necessary man hours and expertise. Most forks are hobby/personal, some form a small community, rarely do we see what you seem to think is a huge risk.

Another factor is the brand, the name and reputation you have built, customer relations, support deals, you can't just fork these things.

Microsoft could open source the entirety of their software today without financial risk.

I can't say, sorry. The dev told me in private and I don't want to violate his trust. Suffice it to say, people on HN usually know it.

> That doesn't mean we have to keep doing these things. I understand that it was a fight to get here.

But we're not here, not by a looong shot and the very fact that you think we are shows you're missing the point. The goal of the free software movement is to make it so that no user has to touch any proprietary software in their lives if they don't want to. Of course they can if they want, but the point is they wouldn't have to.

> I'm told it's shit for the mere fact that it's proprietary.

I very much doubt that's the exact wording, bar some oddballs, but there's no denying that it is strictly inferior to any free software file manager in the user respecting dimension, that's just a fact you have to deal with when marketing to an audience with a large subset of free software enthusiasts. You ARE free to ignore them and they're free to criticize you. It's not a "mere fact", it's the most important factor for many. You have to understand that to many, proprietary software disrespects users, it's about more than the source, it's about the ethics of it.

> They take time out of their day to actively hurt my product by downvoting or commenting in the nice way I described above.

I think you're making yourself a tad self-important here. I am pretty sure there's not many, if any, people that actively go to 'hurt' fman. They're browsing and see a fman post, so they chime in their critique, that's all. This is why launching products is so difficult. If you were to be insulated from the critique, it would be easy. Voting with their wallets and putting pressure on the people who make the product is one of the least tools common people have to affect change. To force humane conditions in factories etc. and in the same way to get as much software that respects the user as possible.

> I talked to the author of a once very popular Mac app for developers.

There's a huge problem here. You won't find many believers in free (as in freedom) software in the Mac crowd, they'd never use a Mac, so the only people there are people who have been milked for decades, (because on macOS, even stupid utilities are pretty expensive), so all they want now is free, (as in cost), stuff. They don't care about user freedom, or they wouldn't be on a Mac. The fact that I need to point this out shows, again, a lack of understanding of the free software movement. I recommend you read up on it.

P.S. Quite frankly, fman doesn't eclipse free software file managers like Dolphin by a long shot, so it's not like people who wouldn't want to pay would get it for the features. In other words, there's no particular need to 'pirate' fman if you will, because there are already more featureful file managers that are free as in both cost and freedom out there. So by making it GPL, you'd really do a service to users who pay for fman. As I said, you'd only make it so that people like me would actually find time spent writing plugins as well invested. Right now, people who write plugins are enriching your product, with it being free software, they'd enrich the software commons.

You keep talking about helping Linux spread, as if you are trying to do some overlooked thing a favor. Linux is BY FAR the most deployed group of software environments/OS' on the planet. I'm not sure who you think you are trying to do a favor?

I agree that the game of changing software and work is fun and interesting in a certain light, but not really meaningful.

At the core of all of this is something that people here just don't seem to want to wade into (understandably): capitalism does not have an ethical foundation. Capital is limited, for some to have, some have to forego (usually not by choice, or laziness, but by systemic force). That is not an ethical or moral system. Yes, we are talking about software here, but so many of the points made here boil down to those that are comfortable with capitalism and (so-called) democracy.... and those that see the major major flaws in it and are trying to actively pursue something better.