>God has nothing to do with a desire to use free or FLOSS or proprietary
>software. Please stop using that reference.

God is central to everything. It is only in this world where we've pushed Him away by our choices. It hasn't changed God. And it hasn't changed our responsibility to Him. It only changes us, and our eternal destination.

>I know plently of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Athiests who
>believe in giving.

So do I. I was an atheist until 2004, and I was a very giving person. :-) One of my strongest arguments back then was that a person didn't need God to be moral, ethical and upright. And I was right, though all of those qualities come from God and exist in the world because He created them. But my purposes in being giving were personal, they weren't acknowledging who He is, nor what He has done through His Son for mankind.

>Many of them are just as likely to use proprietary software.

I also use proprietary software. I am doing all of the development in Visual FreePro right now using Visual Studio 2008 Professional. I am doing this SOLELY because it has edit-and-continue. I do this on Windows Server 2003 running in Oracle's VirtualBox on Linux. :-) I use Whole Tomato's Visual Assist X, which is proprietary, because it's awesome and for $250 + $49/year, I can't approach the level of features it has by donating my time. That tradeoff is a conscious choice and it's a fantastic one. I've had many forum/email discussions with the Visual Assist X developers about opening up the source code and allowing people like me to contribute. They're totally against it, and as a result there aren't certain features that I would desire (such as refactoring, having the cursor on a particular character in the object name you want to rename, and then when you hit the refactor key combination, or right-click menu option, having the cursor come through to that location to save time). I have other features I'd like to add as well. I can't because it's proprietary, and they won't add it, and everybody suffers somewhat because of it.

I choose to personally develop free software (what I call "Liberty Software" to remove the gratis association) because I want to give back what God gave to me (the ability to write software at these levels), and also to separate myself from the Free Software Foundation -- an entity which also believes in giving, but has no association whatsoever with God.

We must remember:
People were marrying and giving away in marriage, extremely happy, giving, social, wonderful occasions, right up until Noah entered the ark and the flood came.

God honors our choices. All of them. Even the ones which lead ultimately to our destruction. He simply tells and shows us what He wants, and those who will hear His truth about eternity, they will follow. Everyone else won't. Only some are being redeemed. That's why it's written: "If today you hear His voice, do not harden your heart." He reaches out to everyone with both hands (literally, with both hands nailed down to the cross). No one is exempted or excepted. The offer is there for ALL who will hear.

It is that simple.