there is nothing wrong to make money from their hard work

I assume you didn’t read my parent comment or perhaps you extrapolated on my beliefs without asking. I even proposed a direct way to ask users to pay.

you cannot and should not force developers to work for free if they don’t want to.

My word, of course not! Where did you get the impression that I want that from? I would NEVER propose something like that, as it stands against everything I believe in; in fact if you read through my history on lemmy I am certain that you’re gonna find plenty of proof of that.

I stand by the original meaning of the word when I say FOSS. It does NOT mean gratis; the misuse of the term FOSS as gratis is my biggest pet peeve. I don’t care how much you charge for your software, if I like the software I will pay for it, exactly how much you’re asking, without a problem.

The F in FOSS stands for Freedom, not price. I have paid for most FOSS software I use on a regular basis and I’m a HUGE proponent of paid FOSS and I have, multiple times, asked FOSS developers that release gratis software to PLEASE open up donations; I do this constantly and I think I may even have done it here on lemmy once or twice.

If you want free software then there are FOSS options out there and nobody forces you to use Boost.

Indeed. My preferred client at the moment is the web ui on desktop and jerboa on mobile. Those are FOSS and developed by the developers of lemmy themselves (to whom I HAVE donated to). But I was thinking about switching client, which is why I asked for the code for Boost to see if it’s software I would be willing to run on my device (and pay for!).

In fact I will even go as far as to say that it is your RESPONSIBILITY as a user of FOSS applications to donate if you can.

To me if software is not FOSS it signals one thing: they are doing something they don’t want me to know about, sometimes this is acceptable (tho never preferred), but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Being able to decide what software runs on your machine should never be a point of contention. Non FOSS software is always a trade off, and for most things (including lemmy clients), it’s not one I’m willing to make, nor should you!