As a free software proponent, I don't see the inconsistency in this case. What would you do as a software oriented person if you had nothing to eat? Why would

As a free software proponent, I don't see the inconsistency in this case. What would you do as a software oriented person if you had nothing to eat? Why would you care about artificial software scarcity imposed by a government that can't even guarantee working people food on the table? You might be underestimating how traumatic and desperate an experience the nineties were for so many people in eastern Europe. People are obviously not very forthcoming with the hardest of their stories, but here's one anecdote. A very close friend - an engineer during the Soviet era- hadn't been paid his wage for months on end. He survived for an entire week in ~1994 on a "creatively sourced" giant box of bananas. For a week. On bananas! What does something like that do to people? How would you react in a similar situation?