I think we are going back to the pricing point which I’ve already addressed in a previous comment. FLOSS is not about money, it’s about user freedom. If the server is open, I don’t think there’s a difference. Yes, it may be slightly annoying to have to run your own, and it has discouraged me from using some apps in the past, but it’s almost always about local vs remote storage rather than paid vs not paid.
As said above:
just to re-emphasise my previous point: I’m not against apps that require a server having some indicator to mark them as such. That’s why EteSync has included such wording from the very beginning. I’m just against marking it as an anti-feature (if the server is also floss) or discriminating based on a price-point (free vs $1 vs $10).
I think the wording in EteSync atm is probably fine:
In order to use this application you need to have an account with EteSync (paid hosting), or run your own instance (free and open source)
Though I think that if we are to start focusing our efforts on pushing agendas into f-droid that are not within it’s mission (i.e not related to FLOSS vs not FLOSS), we should start with privacy. Mark apps that are not end-to-end encrypted and etc. Because again, I think user freedoms are rights are much more important of a topic than apps that have an option to use paid hosting.