in this thread https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21624880#post21624880 the op was upset that an update had messed up things in his version firefox which is a free apparently open source web browser
And near the current last page, a couple of others of the board took him to task pretty much saying you can’t complain about using anything that free
Now personally I think that idea is well bunk to say politely
what says the dope?
People can criticize anything they like. Free or not. But if that criticism is robust in nature and the product is free then the natural response is to point out it’s free. It’s not even a case of “beggars can’t be choosers”. Choose another free software product.
What I personally found odd was the idea put forward that it was a deliberate act. That never crossed my mind. Firefox is not a money making venture. They’re on our side. I just assumed it was a programing error and verfied it with a quick search.
Maybe I mistook the op’s position but: Firefox, you piece of shit!!! FUCK YOU!!! came off as over the top and misinformed. It wan’t the end of the world but honestly it was easily identified as a programming issue and help was on the way. I too was set upon by ads from this very forum but my computer didn’t burst into flames.
If free software caused someone’s computer to burst into flames I could see the outrage. A minor bug that lets ads in doesn’t seem to rise to the level of the angst. I think it OK to point that out so we can all step off the ledge of despair and focus on more important things in life. Otherwise we’ll have people going crazy because McDonalds ran out of fries.
“This Koolaid tastes funny.”
“Perhaps, but it’s free,” replies Jim Jones. “Now drink up.”
Nothing is free or very long. If it costs nothing and someone likes to use it rest assured it will be monetized somehow soon.
Honestly, bitching just gives companies offering free services at one time useful feedback.
Right. It’s one thing to go to a free picnic and say after “wow. I can’t believe they didn’t have ANY non-pork meat products. You’d think they’d be sensitive to the fact that lots of people don’t eat pork for all kinds of reasons” vs “Holy Fucking Shit what kind of psycho, Jew-hating Nazis are they? Fucking fucking assholes. Trying to poison me and starve me and enjoying seeing me suffer because they fucking hate me”. I might well agree with the first comment and feel like the second was an overreaction. If the second person heard me say that, they would probably extrapolate that I meant you can’t ever complain about a gift, but that’s not what I meant at all.
Mozilla and Firefox have existed as a nonprofit / open source project in one form or another for 21 years now. I’m sure they’ll monetize it one of these days.
Alternatively, histrionic criticism of the developers who accidentally introduce a minor problem (that they quickly fix) could lead some of them to go find a more lucrative product to work on.
The continued vitality of Open Source utilities like Firefox is increasingly important to maintaining the security an vitality of the Web as the platforms and services become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a handful of major companies. If you decide to fly off the handle and tell the Firefox devs to eat shit because of an accidental minor inconvenience, your alternative is to trust Google, trust Microsoft, trust Apple, or trust the investment consortium from China that currently owns Opera.
Or I guess you could fork it an go build your own browser.
Carry this illogical meme to its logical conclusion:
If I’m allowed to criticize what I pay for, but not what is free; then what about that which pays me? I certainly wouldn’t be “allowed” to criticize my employer, if the meme were sound.
A pizza shop sometimes has a 2-for-1 promotion, so we take an extra pizza home. “No complaints, please. It was free!” 
Well, there is you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
This can go both ways. In general, I would say you should give free stuff the benefit of the doubt. But if it is really bad, yes, you can & should speak up.
I think it’s reasonable to apply lower standards for free things compared to their paid counterparts but lower doesn’t mean zero. The very act of offering a product to people implies some basic quality threshold even if it is for free.
I have been a Firefox user for 15 years and I was also irritated by their recent problems. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize them. In the case of browsers their competitors are also free anyway. Obviously it’s better if the criticism is proportional and reasonable rather than hyperbolic.
I wonder if Odysseus was familiar with that phrase.
Snicker.
Doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to complain if it turns out to be lame.
I’m struggling a bit with the metaphor. Bad teeth reduce calcium intake, leading to osteoporosis?
Of course you can criticize or complain about something you got for free.
However, some complaints about free stuff betray a sense of entitlement, or ingratitude, or unrealistic expectations.
We all breathe the air, which is free; but it has qualities which we can certainly complain about if necessary.
Tanstaafl. Nothing is free. At the very least, you are paying in time and effort and opportunity cost. If someone gave me a ‘free’ program and claimed I could do X with it and I spent a week trying to get it to do ‘X’ only to find out that it was fundamentally broken and would 't work, you bet your ass I’d complain about it.
Offering something for ‘free’ does not absolve you from the pain or loss in time or opportunity it might cause to the people who use it. It also doesn’t absolve you from legal liability should you misrepresent what it does, or if it hurts someone due to your negligence.
The original metaphor is about the age of horses, which can be told from their teeth. If someone gives you a horse you’re supposed to say “thank you” without checking whether it’s old. But that’s about one of multiple things which make a horse valuable: if the horse you’ve been given is lame (that is, if it simply can’t be used for anything other than horse meat), that’s still a lousy “gift”.
Nothing is free.
Let’s say someone gives you a gift: A raggedy, musty, damp wash cloth. Perhaps the polite thing to do would be to just throw it away and never speak of it ever again, but would it be bad to tell someone, “This is a bizarre and totally useless Mother’s Day gift”? I don’t think so. Nor do I think it would be the worse thing in the world for this thought to be tactfully communicated to the giver so that they can do better next time.
There are people who are paid to criticize things they get for free. These people are called critics.
~Max
I get my air for free, but I certainly bitch about it when we have an ozone advisory that makes it tough to breathe, or there’s enough pollen and mold spores to inflame my allergies.