@paul has stated in another thread (bold added):
I would like to note in passing that as far as I know, Ardour is one of the only pieces of software to use geographically-based suggested pricing, which is a reflection of our desire to acknowledge global disparities in wealth and income.
I pointed out that there is much higher disparity in wealth in my own country than across national averages, so the geographically-based suggested pricing, while clever, doesn’t meaningfully address the global wealth disparity. It assumes that the bulk of disparity occurs across national borders, and this assumption is simply wrong.
In this light, I asked why Ardour expects poor people to pay a minimum fee to download Ardour:
If it doesn’t cost anything (still happy to be shown a non-zero marginal cost) to offer a download free for poor people, why not be part of the solution?
The response was to unceremoniously close the thread. The original topic was slightly different, so fair enough. (In fact, I had explicitly offered to move the discussion to another thread.) It is a shame to lose all the history of discussion in that thread, so I’ll quote as necessary.
So here we are, and the question stands:
Why not offer poor people downloads free (or at cost, if there is some marginal cost)?