The irony of “would rather pay with money”
by Kevin Dangoor
Paul Brown writes about his troubles getting AspectJ editing to work in Eclipse. His solution was to switch over to Emacs. Ironically, he uses this experience to relearn the lesson that “it is better to pay with money than with time” and saying that this is “also why people shouldn’t be shy about paying for or charging money for (working) software”.
I’m not so sure that RMS would be pleased about someone finding a solution in Emacs and then saying that people should not have a problem paying for working software 
Your criticism is fair, but I would argue that the irony isn’t all that strong… I *have* donated to GNU in the past, specifically because I have gotten so much value from Emacs over the years, and I fully recognize that Eclipse 3M8 is beta.
However, the intent of my remarks is somewhat different: If there was a $100 working, portable AOP framework, I would have cheerfully paid for it, open source or not. The community is overly obsessed with free at the expense, potentially, of recognizing value as the difference between effort expended and work completed.
I hadn’t actually intended this post to sound like a criticism, but I see how it could be taken that way. I had, in fact, intended to say that I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that it is better to pay with money than time, and that commercial software products often do have things to offer beyond what the free ones do. I have a PowerBook for that very reason
I just got a chuckle out of the Emacs/commercial software can be good dichotomy when I read your post.