I agree with your sentiment about support. If I sold you a product under the premise that it provides the functionality you paid for, and it doesn't, then I wil

I agree with your sentiment about support. If I sold you a product under the premise that it provides the functionality you paid for, and it doesn't, then I will fix the product so that it does. Free of charge. If you (as the producer of the product) choose to provide a product for free, that is totally up to you if you are going to provide support for free or for a fee. If you (as a consumer of a product) choose to download a free product, you should not have any expectation about the level of support you are going to receive. Depends totally on the vendor. If the product doesn't meet your needs, then you need to find an alternative product or develop your own product. If the product were open source, you could improve the product on your own. But again, totally up to you on whether or not that's how you want to spend your time. Personally, I'd much rather go find a superior product than spend my limited time trying to clean up someoneelse's code. You need to be more explicit about freedom- what you mean as you have written it, is freedom to tinker and modify. The lack of that type of freedom has absolutely nothing to do with cooperation and trust.