Frankly I don't get purpose of this article. Guy wrote some software with clear expectation of money and released it for free. Fine - bad pick of distribution model - it happens.
Then he writes article, stating that you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for money. To whom it's directed? All OSS developers? Including developers of electron (one of his dependencies), which then has tens or hundreds of packages in its dependency tree? What would happen to his browser if they all wanted dollar/month for use?
If you want to code for money - do paid product. That's OK. No reason to build philosophy around being entitled to payment because you have github stars.
To people asking "why not open source?" (iirc have asked this at least once myself) on every non-open-source project released. The answer can simply boil down that the dev(s) are looking to money off it.
He wasn't saying just because you have GitHub stars you should get paid. He's encouraging open source developers to be proud of their work and not be shy about setting up a method for getting paid.
Yeah it's worse to give something out good for free and then make lots of awkward attempts thereafter to monetize, essentially diluting or screwing up what was previously good in a belated attempt to collect compensation. I see this with big sites too; thinking glassdoor and coursera, maybe even facebook falls in this category. In which my initial impressions were positive but at some point these free apps became free-ish and annoying.
Of important note-- open source doesn't necessarily mean free. You can still require paid licenses for eg; commercial use but still provide the source code/allow modification.
Then he writes article, stating that you shouldn't be ashamed to ask for money. To whom it's directed? All OSS developers? Including developers of electron (one of his dependencies), which then has tens or hundreds of packages in its dependency tree? What would happen to his browser if they all wanted dollar/month for use?
If you want to code for money - do paid product. That's OK. No reason to build philosophy around being entitled to payment because you have github stars.