this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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You do add important detail, but I'd make the counterpoint that if the corporation is bullying their least privileged users today, stealing their ~~lunch money~~ privacy, they're not going to stop with only them. This is testing the waters for them.
Plus - it's also messed up that they can fundamentally change the nature of the 501(c)(3) donated version and will likely try to claim a tax benefit as though it's equivalent to a paid copy.
As the saying goes, if a product is free then that means you are the product
In this case, the product was free to OSS developers not because they were the product, but because they're influencers likely to end up encouraging their users and/or employers to buy the paid version, so it was the marketing that those people could do that was the product.
This change with the data harvesting makes those developers the product, though.