I understand that people have had bad experiences and in general I don't want to pay for software components either. But it's weird how much hate there is against developers sometimes just for even trying to make money from their libraries.

If we used it more than just "ok look it works, we'll standardize on this internally" we'd have been happy to buy it, as we all other open source that has a donation option. We were just getting our feet wet, tho, and that's where it seemed burdensome; heck, if it phoned home every time it was used, it would have noticed we only used it about 3 times!