Jason Antic

Agreed. The question is OK (at large, what is the difference between free as beer and free as speech) and it remains the main issue that open source business model has to address and clearly explain. The code is just the seed for a service. You charge for the difference.

Generally a functioning adult gets the idea that somebody has to work to produce these things- both the code and the website and the servers that run them. If they choose to ignore that and make stupid demands, I choose to not treat them seriously. There was more to the email.

I get your point, Jason - while not being certain to be myself a functioning adult ;) It remains that, at large, the business model for open source is still a poorly understood topic - both because it is not that simple and because software history remains taught by marketers.

Many non-tech people don't know how valuable software and services are. People need to be educated to get the idea

Jeffrey, don't you think that, even if software is valuable, the open source bet is not to charge for it (for many possible reasons). When charging for services (a SAS implementation, education, specific dev, etc) it is not ethic to add a supplementary fee to "pay the OS code".

Why should it be unethical to cross subsidise parts of a business or products? E.g does Netflix being free for 30 days make it unethical to charge monthly afterwards?

Sorry, Joachim, I don't get your point. Netflix allows you to test for free the service it sells. That's OK. What I criticized was to over-charge a service based on free software as a way to backward "pay the bills for the code".

I don't get why that's a problem as you state it. The very definition of "overcharge" is handwavy but that's "markets" for you. You have to pay the bills somewhere along the line...