Sorry, that is not how the world works. Stop demanding stuff from people who are giving you things for free. You might have to do things in a more inconvenient way, also for free. Or, if you read the article, someone may gift you a replacement that behaves in the same way and is secure, for which you should be thankful. Perhaps donate some money to the openssh project which is hugely underfunded https://www.openbsd.org/donations.html and which you use daily.
I think you're slightly overreacting to a reasonable point. We all know there's a problem with funding open source but for all you know the person you're responding to might be heavily in credit in that department. We all have opinions about tooling and there's no harm in expressing them clearly.
I'm afraid I may not have worded my original comment well. I was not making demands, I am thankful for the tools I have and use, I do demonstrate that by donating to open source projects as much and as often as I can (but thank you for providing the link to encourage others), and I too as a software engineer contribute my time to such projects, for free, and without want nor need of thanks, but simply to know that my work is making a user's life easier somehow.
It was not my intention to appear to be making demands, I was genuinely asking why deprecate the tool without a replacement. It seems there was a misunderstanding on my part, it is in fact the protocol being deprecated, contrary to how the majority of the article makes the point appear.
As a software engineer, I too have users, and deprecating a simple, functional and easy to use tool is not something I would do without expecting a response, or for them to ask questions about how reasonable that is, whether they pay me or not. Expecting them to use a more inconvenient solution is something we should avoid as software engineers, and instead aim to make their life easier, whether they pay us or not.
I have no issues with switching tools. I have embraced systemd, iproute2, ss and others. Deprecating scp as a tool/syntax, to me, seems more fundamental.
I'd expect no less of a response than if we were to be told that "cp" itself was being deprecated in favour of something which may or may not offer a similar syntax, may require more thought to use and may or may not be available under certain conditions.
I think you are missing OPs point entirely. We already have scp for free. (And thanks!) Deprecating it without providing an alternative is pointless. Are you going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly stop using this incredibly handy tool because some blog post said you should? No.
"[...] without providing an alternative" is a rather strong position. There are multiple alternatives - for many users the underlying protocol changing to sftp will allow them to just keep working as they always did, and they won't even notice the difference. For users copying to machines without a functional sftp subsystem there will be a small amount of workflow modification to do but there are many ways of securely copying files - even if the syntax is slightly different I don't think that means they don't count as alternatives.
Oh man, I really hate this Gnome-style defense whenever users express their opinion developers don't like. Yes, we're grateful, but sometimes we're also upset, and if you try to stifle criticism, you will lose valuable feedback and, eventually, users themselves.
Also musescore: Gets the guy who roasted them on board as Head of UX.
Musescore, but written in Gtk: "That composer just doesn't understand how things are done properly in Musescore. Also, he should shut up and be grateful that it's free."
OpenSSH is primarily a security project, they have provided sftp as a secure file transport, other projects should provide nice interfaces over it, it really is not their aim. This seems to be happening too, which is great.
