I think I speak for most people when I say that I’m a good representative of the general population.
Which is why they said the issue was torrenting and not using too much data. It’s an unlimited plan and they would never think to put a limit on data usage. They just object to torrenting and it’s pure coincidence that they only object to that when someone is using a lot of data.
I actually have quite a high ratio on both the private trackers I use just from seeding stuff for a long time and trading points in so I can download stuff, it just doesn’t help my ratio.
I think this is a good way to use private trackers. Most will have occasional events from time-to-time as well. If you keep seeding everything you get from freeleech, eventually you’ll hit a point where your seeding benefits outpace the amount you care to download and you can just download whatever and not care anymore forever. One of mine I hit that point about six years ago and I just totally take it for granted that I can snatch anything I’m curious about. I do not understand the need to care about your ratio beyond being enough to download things you want without losing your userclass perks.
I actually like private tracker forums a lot, they are communities that no organization will ever care to astroturf and that are free of bot posts. You’re just talking with people, and as you grow to recognize some of the regulars it feels like a community. Anyway, it’s weird how normal most people on those forums are about this stuff considering how if you look at r/trackers you might get the impression that the purpose of these websites is for the users to move up a ladder like it’s a game. (Also the consensus on that subreddit is never use a tracker’s forums under any circumstances ever because you will 100% be banned for no reason because the mods don’t have lives and…what?)
Yeah I don’t have an answer for the thing you’re actually asking (sorry) but this is 100% a reasonable take and honestly I fully approve of their approach here. Strawberry is licensed under the GPL, it is libre software and can be packaged in any FOSS operating system without issue. This adds to the free software community. They are explicitly only selling to people who don’t value free software enough to use a free operating system.
And to be clear, I can guarantee that no one loses sleep over piracy of their GPL software, otherwise it wouldn’t be GPL. I see it more as a way for the devs to wash their hands of troubleshooting for operating systems they don’t want to care about - anyone on windows/mac who cares enough about strawberry to pay gets listened to, but otherwise you’ve created an easy excuse for ignoring the extra work.
As an aside it’s my preferred player on linux, good software.