zlacker

You are not paying, so you are entitled to absolutely nothing from them.

You're not entitled to builds. You're not entitled to an easy build process. You're not entitled to access to a special LTS branch.

While I agree that it's annoying when an open source project is difficult to build, that's an opportunity for an interested contributor to step in and try to make it better. Not an opportunity for you to whine about it.

There is no "gray area". Consider if this was a proprietary product: you'd get literally nothing without paying, and even if you paid, you'd probably just get a firmware binary, with no access to the source.

You sound like an entitled person who thinks other people should make your life easier and give you stuff, without compensation. I suggest you adjust your expectations and stop assuming people should and will do free labor for you.

As an aside, I'm not surprised the build process is complicated: this isn't building a single library or binary, it's building an entire OS distribution. I'm sure the entirety of Debian or OpenWRT is difficult to build as well.

Edit: This bit just really got to me:

> I will NOT trust my firewalls to that, sorry.

Then pay! This idea that your firewalls deserve to be safe and secure and maintainable just because you want them to be, but are apparently not willing to pay for the software to make it so... do you seriously not see how ridiculous that is?

If you're unhappy with how this particular vendor gives away its free stuff, and don't want to pay for the product that you really want, find another vendor. If none exist that you're happy with, that is not the problem of any of these project maintainers. It's yours, and you get to solve it by writing code on your own, or by paying someone else to do it for you. You're not entitled to anything!

>>kelnos+(OP)
Nothing says "free as in speech" like being told there is no "opportunity for you to whine about it."

>>torste+l2
Oh, people absolutely free to whine about it, I suppose, but I'm also free to tell them they're being entitled jerks. I just wish overall that people wouldn't act like entitled jerks, and then the whole problem would go away. A wish that's unlikely to be fulfilled, but hey, I can dream.

Regardless, the whole "free as in speech" (vs. "free as in beer") thing isn't saying that the code is like speech. It was just a way for the FSF to distinguish between the two confusing (in this context, at least) English meanings of the word "free".

>>kelnos+R2
Do you work on Gnome, by chance?

>>torste+G3
Funny you mention that. No, I don't, but I'd often been unhappy with how GNOME was developed, and worked in general. Instead of whining, I stopped using GNOME, and started contributing to a different desktop environment. Our stuff has its faults, too, and none of us have enough of the time we'd like to spend working on it, but we do the best we can with the time that we have and the effort we're willing to put into it.

Not saying everyone has the skills or time or even desire to contribute regularly to an open source project. And that's fine! But that doesn't mean whining about (what you see as) a project's deficiencies is ever cool.

(Note that I'm fine with people writing up constructive criticism. But just stuff like "this project doesn't provide release builds unless I pay and that's not fair" is just entitled nonsense.)

>>kelnos+(OP)
Hit a nerve, did I?

Hoo boy, do I miss the days of the usenet killfile.