>but not as the second arm of a binary choice There very clearly are two parties in a binary situation, and it is implicit in what you wrote: A. The unpaid pr

>but not as the second arm of a binary choice There very clearly are two parties in a binary situation, and it is implicit in what you wrote: A. The unpaid programmer who created the new language. Apparently, because she/he negligently "let other people run their production systems" on the new language, somehow she/he has a moral obligation to support this commercial use of the new language until her/his dying day. B. The people and companies (in fact mainly companies) using the new programming language in production who are not just "some people playing around". These entities presumably chose to use some hot new language in production, because it might solve some business problem. Apparently, they don't have any moral responsibility whatsoever to have a plan in place for what to do if the apparently critical individual who created the new language walks away - for example contracting or employing either the original programmer, or suitable substitutes perhaps. >if you removed such paid contributions to the open source world then you likely would not have much to run in the first place That's very true, but also completely irrelevant to the case under discussion. We're talking about new programming languages created by an unpaid programmers, and still critically dependent on unpaid programmers. >But that doesn't mean that there isn't a cost to fielding a new programming language due to fragmentation Sure there is cost - I don't disagree. Though, there is also a loss-of-innovation cost of not creating new programming languages. My objection is that both you and the author of the article are being coercive, invoking morality in an attempt to control unpaid programmers who are not obligated to you, or to society, and certainly not obligated at all to people/companies that chose freely to use their work in production.