Have I been spoiled by FOSS? And am I being selfish for wishing these high-quality apps were free?
Also, an opinion question: would it be unethical for someone to clone (non-unique) features from paid apps and then release the software for free? If you spend a lot of time and effort on that, you could potentially screw over another dev's source of income, but would it be better for everyone if high-quality applications were available to all for free?
Yes. Even as a FOSS user, you should try to support the software you use (donations, contributing code, linking to the project on your websites, etc.)
Even though project maintainers may love the coding part of the work, there are always not-fun parts that they have to do as well (responding to hostile users, responding to bug reports, etc.) If you get value from those things, you should contribute back to the person building it.
When it comes to Mac, I think the user base is small enough that you can't rely on 0.01% of your users giving you donations.
> Also, an opinion question: would it be unethical for someone to clone (non-unique) features from paid apps and then release the software for free?
No. In fact, this is how a lot of FOSS begins life.
The numbers on buying software once and then getting updates forever just don't work economically. So I don't blame companies for shifting to a different model as long as it isn't abusive (the worst version of this is Adobe Creative Cloud)
>And am I being selfish for wishing these high-quality apps were free?
I mean, yeah? Firstly, I had to look up several of the things you mentioned. I almost wonder if you googled "cool mac apps" or something. You listed a note taking app, a calendar app. There are oodles and oodles of really good options for all of those, both open source or free tier'd. I highly recommend Dynalist for notes, it changed my life.
>If you spend a lot of time and effort on that
You're pretty much never going to get super polished, amazing UI consumer facing open source software. That's just not the space that open source fills.
Not at all. I haven't been an apple user in a long time, but from what I recall, a lot of the paid mac apps were just rip offs of open source projects anyway. The focus on payments and purchases really turned me off of the major commercial operating systems, and I don't think I could ever bring myself to go back to them.