Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better? Are y

Lets say you go to a dance club because people come there to hangout. Is the discotheque ripping you off by not paying for making their dance club better? Are you getting zero value for it? Are their expenses zero for taking the effort to make it a good experience? And StackOverflow does not even charge an entry fee. I believe almost everyone on that site received more value from it than they put in. The amount of time saved by SO is ridiculous and was painfully obvious before the Panda update to Google which demoted the clones in the search results. StackOverflow is the result of tons of hard work on both the technology and the community by the founders and employees. The site scales very well inspite of super heavy traffic and the UI/UX provide a great experience. In fact, the site and their blog posts serve as a poster child for .NET based startups while using OSS software like Redis. Is it really the end of the world if they show an ad or two? The sense of entitlement in the article is just too much for me to bear. The author can take the CC licensed content and go build a Wikipedia style site for all SO cares and instantly get a free bootstrap of millions of quality questions and answers. I think they will actually be happy if it's a better place than SO, because they set out with the aim of making the status quo better for programmers all around the globe and succeeded wildly and raised the bar pretty high.