True, and that is a very valid reason for avoiding commercial software.
I was however questioning the suggestion that the reason he doesn't use commercial software is due to the difficulty/time consuming nature of purchasing said software.
The other concept is that developing good spending habits can help you save money all the time. If I get it into my head that $30 is cheap to spend on a tool for comparing text files, I may also think $30 is cheap to spend for a DNS client, and an SSH client, and a text editor, and a compression/decompression utility, and suddenly I've spent $150 on basic applications for a single PC.
But people have no trouble paying for real life stuff. It's just software that people just will not buy if they can at all avoid it. And while that includes me, I cannot come up with a satisfactory explanation.
I actually have made a conscious effort to avoid buying stuff I don't need, long before PG wrote his essay about it.
I will pay for a bed, because I know that I don't want to sleep on the floor and I can't make a bed myself. I won't pay for a chair, because I have a piano bench and a few blankets that work fine, so long as I maintain a good posture. I may pay $1 to download a song from iTunes even though I already have it on a CD somewhere, because it's faster and easier to do that than it is to dig up the CD and rip the mp3.
Very often when you're looking for tools such as Beyond Compare, you're looking to solve an immediate problem, in the next 5-10 minutes. For a programmer asking a question like "show me the difference between two text files" you are probably be expecting an immediate solution. If you're using unix, all you may need is a page that tells you to try 'diff -u file1 file2'. For a problem that straightforward, a programmer will tend to be suspicious of someone charging $30.
