By putting cheaters in quotes, you're putting words into their mouths. I didn't find the word cheaters on that page. They are making a solid point about the cost of open source software and about how free software isn't free.
"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software."
And like, they have this on their home page:
"100% Free elementary OS is completely free, both in terms of pricing and licensing."
So it's weird to mention cheating or talk about making it harder to download for $0 while talking up the free pricing in their ad copy.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150211113458/http://blog.eleme...
If we want to see the world of open source software grow, we should encourage users to pay for its development; otherwise it’ll be underfunded or developers will have to resort to backdoor deals and advertising. And nobody wants that future.
There really are distros that have a business model which isn't shady. It's a lot of work to do something like have a free version and an enterprise version, you have to do boring things like sell and market and support, but those sorts of things don't represent some kind of Open Source apocalypse.
There are even distros that have a business model of asking for donations without being all passive-aggressive about it...
They turned off user comments and edited their post when they started getting pushback from people asking how much of their revenue is going to upstream developers (which is where the vast majority of the work on this operating system is being done).