Make Bitbucket free

I hope you hear me out. I hope someone with some decision power hears me out.

Right now, Bitbucket is not free. When Bitbucket has functionality that I dislike, I am not free to implement suggestions for you. At best, I can beg and argue with you when you decide that my suggestion is not a good one. If Bitbucket were free, I could go and implement it and show you, "see, this is how it could work, what do you think?" I could have much more leverage with which to help Bitbucket be better if it were free.

I was told that Bitbucket is not free because it is commercial. I do not understand why this is an explanation. Red Hat is free and commercial. Some of the best money I've ever spent. Gitorious is free and commercial despite more directly competing with a behemoth like github. From what we know of their finances, both of these are successful commercial ventures. And they are free.

I am not asking you to give up your trademark, your savoir-faire, your brand image, your hosting, your servers. Ultimately, all of this is what you really sell, just like Red Hat sells support and Gitorious sells support and hosting. I only see you adding value to Bitbucket if you make it free.

Hell, I will pay for access to the source. As much as 50, no, 100 USD per month for a premium source access subscription. Make it so that only premium subscribers have read access to the master Bitbucket repository. I will pay for the privilege to collaborate with you instead of begging you to make changes and arguing with you when you decide WONTFIX, HOLD, LATER, NOTABUG, CANTREPRODUCE.

Make it AGPL. If I or anyone else decides to run off with the source and make a knockoff site (which, btw, I haven't seen happen with gitorious yet, perhaps you have?), your source won't give us a competitive advantage, because we won't have the service, hosting, trademark, brand name, and support you actually sell. Give me the opportunity to buy another product from you.

As it is stands right now, I am not happy with Bitbucket. I think it has potential, but I can't fix it when it doesn't work. Every user of this site is a developer. Every user is a potential collaborator, moreso than any other kind of software. We hackers also like to hack with our and on our tools. We are already writing code. We all give you our source. You don't give us yours. We gave you Mercurial, Python, Pygments, Django. Please give us Bitbucket.

Collaborate with us. Share source like we share it with you. Make it free.