Although we'll allow your message here, I must say we don't share your view of freeware against payware, nor your definition of payware being an expression of "greed".
The difference between payware and freeware is just than some people chose flight simulation as an hobby, others chose it to be a profession, that doesn't automatically mean the latter are driven by greed. I don't know how old are you but, if you have a day to day job, I guess you wouldn't feel greedy asking a payment. That doesn't mean other couldn't enjoy doing it as an hobby, sometimes with very good results.
About "stealing ideas". Sorry, but unless they actually stole actual parts of your code or art, there's no such thing as stealing ideas. Software is protected by copyright only, and copyright doesn't cover ideas or concepts, but only their actual expression.
Patents (if one applies for them), can protect an idea, but in every debate related to software patents, the stronger opposition always come from the Freeware or Open Source communities, for obvious reasons, since if software patents were used extensively, companies like Microsoft or Adobe would surely patent ideas like word processors or spreadsheets or graphic editors, and free products like Open Office or Gimp couldn't exists.
So, unless they really copied actual part of your stuff, you have simply to accept it as a normal competition, the same we (as a commercial developer) have to face every day, coming either from other competing developers or even freeware.
This sentence is particularly disturbing:
Now the greed has begun and the big companies can see an advantage to take what has been in development and wrap it up in a security wrapper and force everyone to pay them in order to use
It sounds a bit like a veiled hint at piracy, as if they wouldn't use a security wrapper, it might have been somewhat ok, since everyone that didn't feel paying for it, could simply download it from pirate sites. Choice of words is important here: the word "greed" seems to pop up very often on web sites and discussion boards, usually related to RIAA/MPAA sueing someone for having downloaded Mp3's.
Flight sim addon market doesn't have anything to do with major record/movies labels: there's no big money involved, and very few commercial addon developers are able to sustain themselves and their employees doing only that. We might be one of the very few, but just barely, and if you count the workload involved creating an addon, the hourly wage of a flight sim addon developer is not much higher than a kid working at McDonald's...so no, greed doesn't have much to do with commercial flight sim development, not at least for developers that take their time to create an addon and, more importantly, support it after its release as well.
We have toyed with the idea of making a weapons addon in FSX since *before* FSX was released. Having access to Simconnect when it was still in beta version, everybody could see it might be used for something like that. But that was only the foundation, adding weapons (doing it in the right way) is a lot of work beside Simconnect, and we don't believe it would been very easy to recover the development costs, so we stopped thinking about it. If other developers believe they could, we wish them good luck, since it would be an interesting product to see nonetheless.
A suggestion: if you really want to fight these commercial products, and make your freeware project stand out, there's an easy way to do it: release an SDK and make it OPEN SOURCE using a very liberal license, like the Creative Commons one. This way, a commercial developer not wanting to pay license fees to the commercial solutions, could use the freeware one instead, make it a "de facto" standard. And this wouldn't prevent freeware projects using it.
