The wrench analogy doesn't work because when downloading a copy of the software, you don't make the original vanish. A copy costs nothing. There are also costs associated to software maintenance that don't apply to the wrench. Software has its own characteristics.
But I think I get the essence of your remark, and that would be that work needs to be paid. I mostly agree (I agree "enough" to carry on anyway), more on that later.
> Unfortunately most business models around free software are ads and user profiling. Rest is just noise.
That's unfortunate but not an inevitability. You don't need to rely on ads for revenue. It's not because many businesses decided that it's okay to spy on their users and steal their time and attention that you are forced to do the same.
The projects I mentioned don't make money through ads. Other big projects are like that as well. WordPress and Nextcloud for instance both have different business models that don't rely on ads. I work for XWiki SAS, we also don't rely on ads. There are ways. You can even sell "licenses" for open source software. We do that (and it's not open core), although I think you complained more about the gratis aspect than the open source aspect. We also make money with consulting, support and hosting.
> don't pretend that REST client is charity or fight for freedom or something
I don't see what you mean. If I'm to rely on some tool, I want to be able to control it and proprietary software doesn't allow me this. So I won't use a rest client if it's proprietary. And I wish this also for my users.
Yeah, maybe I've got too old-school thinking. Or maybe just worked on too many failed startups :). But the overall cheapness of our industry is driving me crazy.
I happily use proprietary software - IntelliJ, Sublime, Affinity, MacOS, etc. In my experience if you get software for free, you are the product, or you will be charged x10 more when they finally get their "business model".
- if it's free software you use locally (or SaaS you know you can self host), you should be able to keep using it even if the business model changes (which can happen in the proprietary world, see Adobe for a spectacular example). If the software is popular enough, there's some chance the thing will be forked and maintained by somebody else. Of course, no guarantees on this. I strongly prefer local software for this reason.
- you should definitely look at the business model of whoever builds your software. If it burns investor money or runs on ads, it's not good, for the reasons you mentioned.
- paid software is not a guarantee against your concerns. I already mentioned Adobe, windows is also full of ads and spying nowadays. VMWare and Confluence also have fucked their customers quite hard on pricing recently. Actually, I quite strongly distrust proprietary software seeing how common these things seem to happen in the proprietary world and there's no "someone is going to fork it" backup plan.
MacOS isn't without issues neither. It forces you to login for software upgrades and to access the app store (that's tracking in my book), and it's game over when Apple stops supporting your hardware. Its proprietary nature pretty much guarantees nobody will take over. Perfectly good hardware becomes insecure or waste unless its owner decides to replace the OS with Linux. Which isn't possible on iPads and iPhone.
On my end, I haven't had bad surprises so far. Ubuntu has been a bit worrying but I've been using something else for years now. The biggest concern for me today is Firefox. The strictly open source nature of the repositories from which I install Firefox is a first "safeguard".
My software is largely sponsored by companies selling support, they have an incentive to make sure it keeps working. It is so good that I can install the latests versions on 15-20 year old hardware.
But I think I get the essence of your remark, and that would be that work needs to be paid. I mostly agree (I agree "enough" to carry on anyway), more on that later.
> Unfortunately most business models around free software are ads and user profiling. Rest is just noise.
That's unfortunate but not an inevitability. You don't need to rely on ads for revenue. It's not because many businesses decided that it's okay to spy on their users and steal their time and attention that you are forced to do the same.
The projects I mentioned don't make money through ads. Other big projects are like that as well. WordPress and Nextcloud for instance both have different business models that don't rely on ads. I work for XWiki SAS, we also don't rely on ads. There are ways. You can even sell "licenses" for open source software. We do that (and it's not open core), although I think you complained more about the gratis aspect than the open source aspect. We also make money with consulting, support and hosting.
> don't pretend that REST client is charity or fight for freedom or something
I don't see what you mean. If I'm to rely on some tool, I want to be able to control it and proprietary software doesn't allow me this. So I won't use a rest client if it's proprietary. And I wish this also for my users.