I’m trying it out now…free or pay if it works I will use it. I believe in people getting paid for what they do if they so choose to go that route. If a product isn’t for me, it isn’t for me, but I don’t think it is fair for people to go after you for putting your product out there.
I suspect I am the people that you refer to, so I’ll offer some enlightenment on my POV.
Your phrase ‘free or pay’ highlights one of the problems with English - the existence of overloaded words. It’s particularly confusing in this setting because when I use the word free (as above) it means free as in libre, not free as in gratis. Actually, most of the time that I use the word free in the context of software I’m talking about the freedom aspect, not the monetary value - and generally use the expression $-free to refer to the gratis version of the word.
I am, of course, very happy with the idea of paying for free software - I have such software installed on my computer. The concept should not be confusing to anyone.
I’ll ‘go after’ (though I was just observing that they’d have a problem flogging their wares here) non-free software in almost any context, for any number of ethical and practical reasons. In this particular instance I think the non-free approach is inappropriate because:
o PHP is free software
o CodeIgniter is free software
The facts that many PHP users also use Apache (free) and run on GNU/Linux systems (free) are just freebies.
My first problem when I trundled off to the site, in response to their $-free advertisement in these forums, was that I couldn’t work out whether their software would run on my computer. As a user of a real operating system, one tends to simply assume that things won’t - but in the PHP/CodeIgniter corner of the net that assumption inverts. It’s non-obvious (to the extent that I had to go to wikipedia to find out) what platforms their software runs on. You could feasibly conclude that this is because they are embarrassed about the fact that they are spurning the free software world, despite taking advantage of it—or that they simply didn’t consider non-Microsoft visitors. It’s hard to say which is worse.
My bigger problem is a hybrid—everything in my development environment is free - that is, I have access to the source, and the right to make changes to same—and after enjoying the benefits of that for so long, polluting my environment with non-free software isn’t an attractive proposition. The other side of this is the attitude inherent in the developers / marketers—it’s a risky move to enter a market populated by customers who like the idea of free software, and produce a non-free product. You’re potentially alienating the people who might otherwise feel kindly to your product. It almost becomes irrelevant that there’s competing products with almost identical functionality, that are both free and $-free.