i don't know. i have been using linux for most of my adult life and i love the idea of opening any application and not having to worry about payment or billing

i don't know. i have been using linux for most of my adult life and i love the idea of opening any application and not having to worry about payment or billing or micro transactions and stuff like that. Cydia back in 2008-10 was like that iirc. The idea was simple. Here is something i built in my free time,you use what you have but if you want something changed or fixed, either do it yourself or pay the dev or someone else to fix that for you. You scratch my back, i will scratch yours without any consideration of "monetary value not being exploited". then payment was introduced so people now started building software for the express reason of "i am spending time so you must pay me, why wont you". Look at newpipe guys. They are tirelessly going about the cat and mouse game of youtube scraping and thousands of people all around the world use their software. They are willing to do it and no one is forcing them to continue this, if i am using their software and so are many others, how does it matter? Tomorrow if the team now decides to "cash in", well they could but then the people will no longer want to associate with them. Again, i am not saying freeloading. It is there for some bit but there are people who are doing it for the express reason of helping the community. It is why F-droid/Gorhil has my trust even more than anyone else online. Will it help developers? most certainly. if i am able to contribute financially to the development of software without any hackarounds, i will but paywalling would make it just another app store/play store.