Ask HN: Offended by the term “freeloaders” in Linux/Open Source?
I my book "free loaders" is another term for users and potential customers. Without them there would be no carriers of the "message", no market for distributions, no commercial usage, no market for education. Linux would have been a niche thing without users. Please don't use that term.
1 comments
When people use "freeloaders" the way you mean, I agree. But there is one case where it's appropriate: when people or companies take software released under a permissive free license and create a proprietary fork of it.