Corion said the following to someone about the fact that Perl as a programming language is free:
I'm willing to sell you support for parent.pm, which includes the guarantee that bugs will be fixed (additional payment necessary to implement bugfix, fees payable monthly in advance, all prices excluding 19% VAT). But unless your money is on the table, I will stay with "should".
and I have seen similar comments over time.

My personal feeling is that free software will only remain attractive if it is the best solution. The free software model is excellent because lots of people can get the software and feedback on their problems, giving the FOSS developer a lot of opportunity to make a better product.

I do not feel that free software should lag behind in quality because whoever wrote it is not being paid. I dont take that attitude with my modules and if you get that attitude, then you are basically saying that you expected pay and that paid software is a better option.

I have heard people say: "there is a lot to be said about people who are paid to answer your questions" --- and if we cannot offer superior product and service for free, then commercial options will become more attractive and there will be fewer jobs and opportunities for free software.

The GNU project is a perfect example of what aiming to produce the best software with the best documentation for free can be. They do not make excuses for their software being free. They did whatever is necessary to have the BEST product, free or paid. And Linux would not be what it is if it were not for an entire decade of 100% free, intense, top-notch labor.

We cannot complain about lack of payment. As I said, because it is free, we get tons of practical use cases that commercial vendors dont. And we cannot let those who get paid to build commercial languages and systems to outdo us and become more attractive. Unless you want to spend all day writing in C-sharp because $boss likes their libraries, support policies, and code quality.

In reply to If you want a passionate open source life, you need to fight for it by metaperl

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