Hi ZebulonPi, thank you for your response.
We understand that the developer can be a job, and indeed everyone has their favorite way they like to monetize and gain revenue from their job and products which comes in many different forms like donation, paywall, etc.
Well, as you can see, the context regarding the disagreement of paywall our founder, JOELwindows7 had said only points to Software, as he should've implied further if haven't. Obviously, it is make sense to pay to obtain Hardware and shoplifting physical items means thief, which of course we do not encourage doing at any moment at any time. Also, we already know, pirating software is bad idea. Therefore we usually purchase software in legit ways. Although being a good person, we are only excited to purchase video games at the moment. For tools like Aseprite, Adobe, etc. we prefer to avoid such, and rather use any alternative $0 software tools as all as possible, due to our company policy.
As a matter of the fact, we are deeply disappointed regarding the decision Aseprite has made in terms of license, where formerly was a free culture compliant, GNU GPL v2, now went into a proprietary licensed according to their GitHub page. with this change, Aseprite is allowed to restrict redistribution which before, the GNU GPL v2 license requires the product to be redistributable. Beside of their default license, there is a special license for education which can be requested by education institutions.
Fun fact, yesterday we have researched the project Aseprite and found out that you can compile one yourself, absolutely free. unfortunately though, we have not yet compiled the source code ourselves, so we have no idea what outcome will be whether it is the full version or trial version.
We also have to mention regarding the GNU licenses which couple days ago our founder had criticized for reasons like Price. according to his thought, GNU licenses do not explicitly mention the requirement for price of the product, although in any case the source code shall remain visible publicly. in fact, GNU itself had clarified about selling product, and as it says, that GNU allows you to sell the software (in our thought, that is the binary), while still requiring you to share the complete source code available to the public. Restricting selling would otherwise become irony to the freedom philosophy. one of the example project that are licensed GNU based but paywalled binaries are Ardour, and this Aseprite (formerly GNU GPL v2, now proprietary or education). by this matter of fact, our founder then thought to make his own license that are like GNU but disallow paywalling both binaries and source code, however the idea is on hold due to complexity in execution, planning, and embargo.
you can read the article our founder had written here
As the we have went by time, we are going to tell you that we are changing our Reaction Policy, especially regarding paywalled soft copies. as a matter of the fact, our founder had ever started to subscribe a Patreon artist for the purpose of the apology as well as further expanding his collector passion forward. As of right now, we have added some things that we are looking forward to purchase beside video games, however tool isn't the option yet. Apology to Aseprite and other project directors alike. Perhaps next time.
in conclusion, We are apologize for what our founder had said in previous year. What our founder said is indeed bad, and unprofessional. We apologize for your inconvenience. At that time we have not researched enough before we react to any situations. We have learned and still learning.
Thank you.