zencuke:
It is an issue only of interest to the poster.
No, it's not. He might not be the only one. It is important to look at edge cases like his.
Personally I make it a policy to be grateful when someone makes a major work like Arduino available for free. Quibbling when the details are not exactly what I would choose would feel selfish and ungrateful. Maybe childish is a better word.
In case you haven't noticed, the official Arduino is around $30. It's open source because it almost has to be, its code is based off Processing.org and Wiring.org , the tool chain is GNU, and if the schematics and core source code are not available, then many people would not find it useful. Derivatives and clones exist because Arduino is open source, and they take full advantage of the fact that if Arduino was not open source, the official Arduino would have no market.
Arduino is not some sort of charity. Arduino uses the works of skilled community members to make itself very attractive to more skilled and newbie hobbyists, thus I think making a complaint, or even a demand for change, is perfectly acceptable.
And I can't believe you registered on this forum just to complain about something off topic.
I know it's completely non-standard practice, but I think there can be a way for a user to customize the file extension settings. Arduino can have a configuration file where the default file extension is stored, this would be loaded into a static string upon launching Arduino and all new files, file open/save dialogs, and other things would use that extension for that session. It is easy to change the default program association in any operating system too.
edit:
at the time of this post, zencuke's total post count was 1
edit:
zencuke's next post is not worth a new post, so I'll add my thoughts here:
Nothing wrong with open source making money, but that doesn't mean people can't complain about flaws in the project. You can't complain about a free lunch from a food bank, but if free samples at a supermarket gave you food poisoning, I think you have every right to complain.