I was just being pedantic and corrected what is meant by the term “free software”, not actually arguing for or against what you were saying :)
Yes, of course, a project being paid will mean that a lot fewer people will actually use it. I wouldn’t say nobody, though. As an example, there’s the DeArrow browser addon which is free, but costs $1 once (with easy ways to circumvent that payment). Yet many people have paid for it anyway.
As for curl, the article says that the 23 sponsors you mentioned are only corporate sponsors. There are hundreds of people donating to the curl project, which is probably still unreasonably low, but not as dire as “only 23” would suggest. Obviously each of these donates a much lower amount, so it may still not amount to much (but I don’t know enough to say that).
But in the end, as I said, you’re probably mostly right, there would be very few users of free software if it was paid. Although there are also lots of users of proprietary paid software, so who knows.
I was just being pedantic and corrected what is meant by the term “free software”, not actually arguing for or against what you were saying :)
Yes, of course, a project being paid will mean that a lot fewer people will actually use it. I wouldn’t say nobody, though. As an example, there’s the DeArrow browser addon which is free, but costs $1 once (with easy ways to circumvent that payment). Yet many people have paid for it anyway.
As for curl, the article says that the 23 sponsors you mentioned are only corporate sponsors. There are hundreds of people donating to the curl project, which is probably still unreasonably low, but not as dire as “only 23” would suggest. Obviously each of these donates a much lower amount, so it may still not amount to much (but I don’t know enough to say that).
But in the end, as I said, you’re probably mostly right, there would be very few users of free software if it was paid. Although there are also lots of users of proprietary paid software, so who knows.