Please don't post dunks like this here. HN is for curious conversation and the guidelines ask us to be kind. We have no idea whether the thing they had in mind when they asked that question 8 years ago is relevant to what they think about the current topic. You could ask them rather than piling on like this.

I didn't ask how to do a bait and switch to offer a good free product and later ask for more money or else I'm going to make it worse. But I guess nuance is hard to understand.

Also it's always funny when someone tries to look up your past instead of giving convincing arguments.

Did you really go looking over years of their post history for this retort?

Then why is HTTP, CSS and HTML free ? It's creators need to eat too. Should they start charging for it ?

I like how we recognize this necessity to our biology but commit everyone to Hunger Games-lite performative, fiat (by decree alone), economics due to lack of political action in the face of some walking dead politicians who can't get through a day or week without handfuls of pills, they're that pathetic.

We are a deeply unserious society.

Anyway; good luck going viral online, everyone. I got lucky, have had generational wealth in my back pocket since birth, am off the hook for you by our social norms. Hopefully it works out for you because I and the rest of us won't be engaged in political action on your behalf. Dance for the organ!

When you start making your open source project worse for your users because you are not making enough out of it I'll choose to use something else.

There's a point where it's too much and it just feels like a trojan horse when later you stop caring for your free users.

The answer to "how should free things make money" is to not make them free. Any counterexamples are very fortunate. I don't know why people insist on giving away things for free while they actually desire to make money from those things. If the thing is valuable enough, someone will pay for it. Else...not

Sorry I honestly didn't anticipate my opinions to be so divisive and this outcome wasn't my intention. I'll do better.

Could you delete my comments too ? Thank you