You make an interesting point about the dangers of blindly "monetizing", but I don't think it's relevant to parent's comment for a few reasons (not the least of which that paying for software doesn't by itself reduce its utility, unlike the ice-cream + scenery example where the implicit scenery value is removed in the commercial "product").
Natural scenery doesn't cost money to make. Making profit off of it isn't intrinsically value-creating.
Software does take effort to make, and being comfortable finding ways to monetize it means more programmers can afford to create things like this. Not everyone has as enough free time to make all the things we want to pro bono. Many people have jobs (often for other people who did figure out how to monetize their own ideas).
So I'm all in favour of developers practicing asking/answering that question, because often finding the answer is what allows them to actually pursue those ideas. It's not wrong for people to sell the fruits of their labour—the world gets fruit that might not have existed otherwise.
Natural scenery doesn't cost money to make. Making profit off of it isn't intrinsically value-creating.
Software does take effort to make, and being comfortable finding ways to monetize it means more programmers can afford to create things like this. Not everyone has as enough free time to make all the things we want to pro bono. Many people have jobs (often for other people who did figure out how to monetize their own ideas).
So I'm all in favour of developers practicing asking/answering that question, because often finding the answer is what allows them to actually pursue those ideas. It's not wrong for people to sell the fruits of their labour—the world gets fruit that might not have existed otherwise.