> does not make them any less free to you
Of course not, but it does make them unencumbered. And I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that's cost (i.e. not free) of doing business with a sponsored open source language.
Of course not, but it does make them unencumbered. And I'm not complaining. I'm just saying that's cost (i.e. not free) of doing business with a sponsored open source language.
I never said "nothing is free", nor implied that, but merely that users need to cognizant of the goals of "free" language maintainers (especially when there is a corporation rather than a person as BDFL) that do not necessarily align with the goals of the median or average user.
Now that we are on this topic, I'm starting to think maybe it's worth paying for a programming language so that the goals of the maintainers are better aligned with the goals of the users. That being said, there is real value to the ability inspect the source. As such, it's very difficult to do open source as a paid product.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20100220100027/http://clojure.or...
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20140704050611/http://clojure.or...
My own interpretation: programmer culture has such problems that someone actually considered corporate funding healthier than user donations.