So free software is about freedom, not choice (which comes in a distant second place of consideration in the development of FOSS). Can this be interpreted as “freedom for developers” vs. “choice for users”?
I’ve drawn from the continual debate between the “whiny users” and the “volunteer developers” that free software – particularly that which is licensed under the GPL and other copyleft licenses – bring more long-term benefits to the programmers than it does to non-programmer users. It provides programmers with the right to observe, tinker within, and redistribute source code, as they are usually the only ones who have any long-term interest in the source code’s composition.
But the non-programmer users? As far as the programmers are concerned, f**k the non-programmers; they don’t deserve anything, and are expendable…unless they pay up.
No, that guy’s talking about not having to maintain three things when one would do. He doesn’t want money, he wants less to go wrong, and thus more chance of a working, easily maintainable system.
I also should have put up these other links:
* “Linux is a Community”
* “Linux is not about choice”
* These two smackdowns by elanthis at Ubuntuforums.org: This and this.