The thing about free as in beer is that you're fundamentally within your right to give that beer to someone else. There's a difference between charging for a product and gatekeeping its use. Any attempt to gatekeep fundamentally corrects itself and often comes close to sinking the original project.

Just look to examples like Elasticsearch. Put up a paygate and find your project forked (it was free as in beer after all) and watch yourself slowly slip into irrelevance.
It's just one example of many which have followed this path.

How? Fundamentally big projects like this aren't starved for finance. Wayland was the brainchild of Kristian Høgsberg who was given scope and time to do so while being paid a full time wage for another employer (Intel for much of the time).

The problem is still captivity. It's not a consumer choice. Literally no consumer has ever said "I would like to use an app to pay at just this station", yet the vendors forced this on people anyway. Why? Because it benefits *them* and because consumers have no alternative. The precise mechanism that made this a problem in the first place it the mechanism that prevents it from being solved through consumers. This was always about corporate control.

Customers can't vote with wallets. That's a fundmental problem of understanding. You need conditions of a perfect market with equal power for consumers to have choice. Charging isn't that.

Think of it as the difference between a supermarket: Customer has the power not to shop, and a midnight convenience store, people who use that do so out of necessity and don't have the power not to shop.

I gave an example in my other post. I drive to another State in the USA. My car pings me that I have less than 10% battery (35mile range) so I select a charging station on the side of the highway. Detour. Get out. Walk to the post and ... it needs an app. Now what do I do?
a) spend 2min installing the app? - company wins
b) get back in the car having wasted 2 min at this stop, drive down to the next (and possibly final) option for charging and try my luck again knowing that I may need to install an app anyway?
c) plan ahead in a way that further perpetuates the range concern of electric cars and stop to fill up when I still have 30% left potentially requiring another stop to my destination (which costs way more than 2minutes).

The sensible option is a) and it's the one most consumers will pick because of this market captivity. There's no real choice to vote with your wallet, not without incurring a personal cost in terms of time.

It depends on location in the world, but even in places where chargers are frequent there's a question of how often / early you want to charge. My car for example will give a notification to stop at a charger when the battery is below 10%. At that point you're looking at only 50km remaining charge (not too different from the point where the low fuel light used to come on my previous car). Now realistically going down a highway that gives me the option of 1 or 2 chargers only. If I am willing to move off the highway then I probably have the option of 4 chargers.

But then the question: How low do I go? Do I pull off at one point, swear and then get back into my car and drive off again to the next place? Luckily I don't live in a situation where that's an issue (thanks to that EU law I mentioned), but realistically am I going to go to a different charger and try my luck again knowing I may need to install an app anyway and need to make a second stop, or will I capitulate and simply install an app? Most consumers will do the latter.

The issue is the charging industry does not make a lot of money. It's a significant cost outlay for very little return and a small market share. Petrol stations actually also make very little money, they rely a lot on incredible volumes and sales of overpriced convenience items to make a profit. Charging companies don't have that luxury, in fact most of the time you will plug in your car and then go spend money at a petrol station or starbucks or something while you wait for it to charge.

No, it's not what is happening, the analogy breaks down because it expects a voluntary contribution from someone outside of the organisation. Nothing about a waitress tipping at any point involves someone doing voluntary work with an expectation of variable income. A waitress is an employee of an organisation, the fact that organisation pays them incorrectly is not analogous to someone not paying for open source software.

If you insist on staying with food and not liking the cake approach, consider maybe someone who volunteers at a foodbank. Open source work prepared for anything other than contracted / full time employment is volunteering. That has nothing to do with tipping a waitress.

Awww don't like it when you are proven wrong and don't have a comeback and someone refuses to let you have the last word? I'm playing the world's smallest violin in honour of your tiny penis.

Yes I absolutely am not smart enough to ask someone to send me their complete project so I can self host it just to do a PR request and then package it up and send it back to them so they can import it - incidentally this process (which would achieve what you want) would lock a project so that only one person can make a single change at any single point in time. This would be very stupid.

Now you have two choices: Either admit that you asked something incredibly stupid, or admit you didn't understand the original problem, and also didn't understand my very simple reply to you.

Either way you look very stupid.

It sounds very much like you spend all your time reading The Daily Mail. In reality the "media" report on a very wide variety of results from a wide variety of people. Maybe a diet of less shock news can set you straight.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you saying that you don't believe the outcome because you incorrectly sumarised it in your head? That you don't believe the outcome because you didn't read TFS or TFA properly? Or that you just ignore everything and make up your own answers to suit what you think people were studying?

Sony never actually made "Compact Flash" cards. They made XDQ, CFexpress Type A and Type B cards. Compact Flash is effectively a legacy format and that market very much is dominated by Sandisk.

in the XDQ and CFexpress space there were a lot of new entrants into the market. Among some of the best are OWC and Angelbird, both of which can punch above Lexar's weight. Sandisk is effectively not competing in this space. They produce only bottom tier cards with their Extreme Pro being about 1/4 of the speed of the heavy weights, and their Pro Cinema line being better but not great. Lexar can match performance but get dominated by OWC on price (historically, not sure about now). Sony are competitive with the high end in this space but nothing to write home about.

No one here is talking about memory sticks. The memory stick was abandoned 7 years ago. We're talking CF express cards and SD cards in Sony's Tough line.

I mean it's a nice guess, but back in reality land a quick google search could have shown that they are price competitive with other CFexpress cards in their class. Yeah you'll find cheaper, but pair that with slower. Many people need memory cards that actually meet performance criteria. For "nobody buying them" they certainly had a very complete product catalogue spanning many different types, mid end to the high end, from last decades capacity, to current cutting edge.

If no one was buying them then they would consolidate their product line, not cancel every possible related storage device type. Your theory doesn't just fail occam's razor, it fails the drunken pub test. It makes no sense.

Then you make the claim and use discover to prove. Your "more likely" case still demonstrates complete negligence.

Hate me? Motherfucker if I caught my children smoking they'd be out on the street, disowned, and I'd be in the bedroom making a replacement for their sorry asses. Parenting isn't about letting young idiots (which they universally are) who are incapable of making good choices do whatever they want. That's "bad parenting". It's the reason we don't treat kids as adults in the first place (and one of the reasons selling this stuff to them is already illegal).

You're missed the biggest benefit: You can quickly identify those people who make poor life decisions.