> But for there to be any form of income trickling down production chains, someone has to be willing to pay something for the services they consume. Is this controversial in any way?
No, but it is also entirely orthogonal to the blog entry we're discussing. At no point does the monetary cost of something enter into what Sussman is talking about. You seem to be conflating free-as-in-beer with free-as-in-freedom (man, I feel nostalgic writing those phrases again – I don't mean this as an offense, but the difference seems to be so much more well understood among the tech savvy these days than it was 15 years ago).
This is where the coffee analogy becomes relevant. While indeed the cost of coffee affects a lot of things in the coffee value chain, the idea of fair trade (for all its flaws, let's not digress into those here) are not about the end product's cost.
