Without getting into a long ideological discussion, my position is I love free software, and I still don't want FOSS to exterminate proprietary software. I also think there's still a lot of unexplored space in the area of making a living off of FOSS, so I can see where lcuk is standing.

Ads can be really intrusive, but ads are only one way of obtaining sponsorship. I don't think having a dialog box explaining the sponsorship is the greatest idea either for a couple of reasons. No one will look at it and the sponsors are smart enough to know that, and I don't think sponsorship should result in changes in application functionality.

Maybe the application title could be something like "liqbase by Coca Cola"? That wouldn't bother me terribly. Or if you and a sponsor can find a design that both reflects the sponsor and what the application does, you could give them influence over launcher icon.

I've been doing various forms of FOSS advocacy for near a decade now and it's where I hang my hat. But I think people shouldn't get flamed for wanting to try to make a living producing innovative free software.