I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
Free on free software stands for freedom, not for free of charge.
Someone is paying for foss somehow. Maybe it’s the dev with his time and effort, maybe is an enterprise, maybe it’s a few fellows that contribute financially.
The point is: we all have to pay our bills. Someone is being charged to maintain foss.
It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.
So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.
Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.
Well, your assumption that I heard (or I am) an anarchocaptalist is wrong. I have a lot of critics to the captalist system.
I fiercely disagree with dismantle of public policies. Actually I support free and universal healthcare system (like I have in my country), free and good educational system, free and public transportation system, and many other ideas. However all of these free stuff are paid with our taxes. It’s public and free, but it’s not out of charges, cause someone is paying (this case all of us).
But for this to happen, it’s necessary public policies to invest public money on every one of these projects. Afterall, nothing is free.
In the other hand, we have a lot of FOSS software, that most of them is maintained by one person or a small group of persons. Maybe this software may solve an issue to a specific person, but it’s not relevant to the most part of the users. There is no interest to invest public money to pay for these kind of projects, cause they don’t solve anything meaningful for the majority. It does not means that the project is meaningless, but it’s not relevant enough to get investment.
The maintainers of these projects have their bills to pay. If they can’t pay their bills, they will certainly abandon the project to make money. It’s not good for anyone.
If the FOSS community normalize paying for the apps, probably we’ll have a much stronger community. But don’t get me wrong, when I say “paying” I don’t mean as in a closed source apps where if we don’t pay, we can’t use it. I mean paying like a tip. Zorin OS do this very well. Bitwarden too. Many FOSS apps do it.
Of course it will be really good if public policies support these kind of development, but it’s not an easy task.
Remember, despite you and I dislike the capitalism and how society is structured today, we still live in this society and we (and the devs) have to pay our bills.
No, hey, let me be clear, I don't think you're actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.
What I do say is that the notion that "it's not free, it all comes from taxes" is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn't the same as paying for a service, and public services aren't "services you pay with your taxes", they're... well, public services.
And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it's a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you're definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that's not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that's not the same thing.
So hey, I get it, you don't ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you're still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You're right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you're willing to explore.
I hate this argument even more passionately. Since austerity has been eating away at all social programs…particularly ones that involve technology (which should be the correct avenue for funding FOSS software projects), we must, as citizens, financially incentivize software developers to avoid the monetization traps that exist.
Case in point: I’ve recently been working on a way of federating inventory. I’ll let you guess how viable that project is without some way of COMPLETELY UNDERMINING THE SOCIAL GOOD OF SUCH A PROJECT SIMPLY BECAUSE I HAVE TO PAY RENT AND EAT FOOD WHILE WORKING ON IT. I’ll let you guess how many different ways that I will likely need to compromise the sanctity of my vision (which should basically be an addition to the open pub/sub protocol) just to make working on it something that could support me. If my project were funded by governments and non-commercial entities, I’d be fine. But the reality is: these kinds of technologies are often compromised because of this same bullshit line of reasoning.
We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can't rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn't be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.
I don’t personally support badgering users. I’m talking about the compromises built into most of our projects that are only NECESSARY because our social programs have been scrapped.
In a sufficiently advanced socialist society, FOSS projects would be funded the same as roads. We don’t live in that system. I wish we did. We live in a system where Meta, Google, and Amazon have gigantic government contracts and they use that money to pay their devs to compromise open protocols. The reality is that indie devs with true integrity (like the ones who built the platform were having this discussion on right now) need more funding than they’re getting. I appreciate them not hounding people for money but that doesn’t eliminate the need for it…
to create a strawman argument about being “hounded” is disingenuous at best.
It's not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn't to you) was triggered by the notion that we "need to normalize paying for foss". I don't think that's true, and I do think it'd lead to generating a "tipping system". Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.
I'm also not fond of "we live in a system" as an argument for playing by the system's rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that's what the "system" is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn't mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.
Anyway: Either we enact social change or we literally do the thing that you said: we need to normalize users feeling obligated to pay for FOSS software.
Actually: IMO, we DO need to normalize people understanding that the reason their software doesn’t suck is because the dev has integrity and hasn’t sold out to corporate interests. They should be reminded of that fact because the pull of greed is PERVASIVE.
The way I see it,
We have two options:
A.) fix the broken FOSS system to properly fund projects that eschew monetary gains and the stockpiling and hiding intellectual property in the interest of the sanctity of these technologies.
If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn't root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling "obligated" to pay, they either won't pay anyway or won't use the software. That's not a viable option.
So you're left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is "broken" or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is... well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that's where the effort should go.
I very much agree that the social change route is for the best. However, being a cynical old man that has watched Google and others lay waste to the open internet time and again, I guarantee that we’ll have to go with the FOSS hounding route unless some new viable alternative pops up. Thanks for the spirited discussion! I think we both, in the end, want the same thing.
This is why the GPL is so important. It doesn’t require them to donate, but it does require them to release any bugfixes they made or software they made using it
I think their point (may be wrong) is that none of this high powered software would exist without the goodness of strangers. Tbf it probably wouldn’t look like this without business / on the clock contributing either
True, but AWS and the cloud in general likely would’ve never evolved without top notch free software, i.e. Linux, because the cost would’ve been prohibitive. I am on a team that runs a small public cloud and there are many systems needed to support the cloud, it’s not just the instances/VMs.
If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.
Which, by itself, is fine. But their contributions to open source are very one-handed and pale in comparison to how much they benefit out of it.
Hell, my company is no different. They allocate one day out of the year as “open source day” where devs can contribute back to open source projects on company time. But it must be something we already use.
No personal development. No non-essential libraries.
We make literally millions off of these libraries and we don’t even contribute monetarily.
If these companies gave even 0.01% of their revenue to these essential libraries, they’d never even have to ask for money.
it’s not only clouds, everyone uses open source and like whole secure WWW etc. is using openssl, every site uses some kind of open source js library, should they all go proprietary because they don’t pay?
While I applaud compensating FOSS developers, there’s a devil in the details: all software stands on the shoulders of many giants. The nature of software, and software users, means that most money is going to go to front-end developers, regardless of effort. They, in turn, would have to rigorously re-distribute most of that money to the developers of the great many many libraries and frameworks that their software depends on. I would argue that it is practically impossible for this trickle-down to happen fairly, which would result in developers of deep, indirect dependencies used by everyone being ignored. Throw a shitty, low-effort GUI on restic, and you’d end up with all the donations. If you’re ethical, you’d give 99 cents for every dollar to the restic devs; how likely is that? An added wrinkle is that people are really bad about estimating the relative worth of their efforts; even if everyone in the stack is ethical, how do you estimate the relative value of your effort against the effort of the database binding library you use? How much of your donations do you give to each developer of the 40 libraries you directly import?
Another issue I personally have is that compensation invites obligation. It breaks the itch-scratching foundation of FOSS.
Finally, I think introducing money into FOSS is a virus that ultimately destroys the only functioning communism in the world. It changes developer behavior, or at least introduces perverse incentives, in undesireable ways. I’d rather end-users contribute in whatever way they can: well-written bug reports, PRs that fix spelling in docs, wiki “how-to” contributions, code contributions. From each, according to ability. That’s what keeps FOSS running, and that’s the spirit of FOSS.
Now, I’m fully in favor of for-profit companies funding and supporting projects. They’re making money off FOSS, and should roll that down. All of the same trickle-down issues apply, and certainly it introduces the same perverse incentives, but greed should have a cost, and all for-profit companies are by definition engines of greed.
I advocate for that since years. We need to normalize to pay for OSS. The biggest issue I see is not that people are unwilling to pay (donate) for the software they use daily, but the the payment itself is to complicated. There is not “the one” app store for OSS that every OS uses that makes donations easy. Additionally taking care of taxes for donations is too much of a burden, so the app store needs to handle that as well. And voila: You have the Apple App store or Android Play store.
If taxes are a concern then I think opencollective.com is the recommended platform:
“Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community. What do you want to do?”
It's quite sad to see reasonably popular apps with virtually no funding. I feel like highlighting the case of rssguard, probably one of the most popular apps in its category, with patreon, liberapay, and offering to prioritize bugs and suggestions from donors... barely 5€ per month.
Oh, I almost forgot, in these topics there should be a mandatory mention of core-js case.
I only skimmed your article, but so far I like what I am reading, and how you dovetail it into a discussion about UBI and so on.
But one quick criticism: if I were you I would try to get a bit more well-versed on the difference between “free-as-in-free-beer” software, “free-as-in-freedom” software, and “open source” software. There are lots of articles about this, especially at the The Free Software Foundation. But in short:
Free as in “free beer”: you can use the software without paying for it. They are usually making money off of you some other way, by charging certain users fees, by collecting and re-selling your private data, selling ads, or all of the above.
“Open source”: means the source code is available and you might even be able to contribute to it, but the maintainers reserve the right to distribute modified builds of the “open source” version that can make money off you the same way “free beer” software does. It is a good way for large companies to get free work done for them (bug fixes, feature requests) from their technically literate users.
Free as in “freedom”: the software license guarantees by law that users of the software must have access to the exact source code of the build of the software that they are using (without modification) regardless of whether or not you charge money for it so that your end users have the freedom to inspect whether the code is honest. It also guarantees that you have the freedom modify the source code however you please, but the license contract requires that you grant the same freedom to everyone else who is using your modified copy of the source code. “Free as in freedom” software protects the freedom (as in civil liberties) of anyone who uses it, open source does not.
Constructive criticism is invaluable, so thank you. This point has been brought up multiple times by now, therefore I'm thinking of a way to incorporate it into the text. For starters a link to this Lemmy thread has already been included.
There's a deluge of impersonal, academic, dry sources of information out there. If I chose that road it would just feel like writing a thesis. It's on my personal website, so I hope you can forgive a touch of personality. The levity is what keeps me going; there's so much frustrating/disheartening news all around us and comedy is a crucial way of dealing with it.
Anyhow, I appreciate you taking the time to interact.
A whole lot of words follow but if fucking Spotify is on your list of free software, all that indicates to me is that you've put a whole lot of work into failing to understand the concept of free software.
No association with or reference to crypto“currencies” because these are greed incentivizing pyramid schemes.
Vivaldi isn't included because it's a commercial enterprise? I don't exactly understand that, but they did say they bought a €22 T-shirt.
The last one, they've put it in exceptions! They specifically said it was not free software, and they only listed it for its convenience and typically being used in the free tier!
A whole lot of words follow but if fucking Spotify is on your list of free software, all that indicates to me is that you’ve put a whole lot of work into failing to understand the concept of free software.
That’s a bit harsh. I would agree with you that they seem to be pretty ignorant of the finer points of free software, like the difference between free-as-in-beer software, free-as-in-freedom software, and so-called “open source” software. But to be fair, the article was more about economics than about software, and I mostly agreed with a number of their arguments.
User @QuazarOmegaalready pointed this out, it depends on the definition of free, of which I'm positive the majority of my list complies with. Moreover, I did apologise for including Spotify, and offer alternatives:
“Despite their free version forcing ads, the paid version is too convenient, sorry. However, their UXD has become more annoying so I'm not sure how long I'll stick… If cross platform functionality isn't a big deal for you then consider Tidal which pays artists significantly more [5], or BeatSense for simple YouTube playlists and listening together.”
If there are better alternatives—to anything really—please share them instead.
Regarding Vivaldi: Why isn’t Vivaldi browser open-source?
Lastly, about Mega and Telegram, I added “breaks rule 3” to their listing. Mega is just remarkably convenient too, and unless the populace suddenly turns geek and they find out about the Matrix protocol, I'd prefer they use Telegram en masse instead of WhatsApp.
I don't really give a damn about why the developers of Vivaldi (and the others) chose not release it as free software. They made that choice long ago and have stuck with it. That's fine. It means I have no interest in their product, but to me it also means that discussion about it is out of place in an article with "free software" literally in the title in a forum called "linux" where the FSF definition of freedom should prevail.
That's a slippery slope into bigotry, dogma. It should be possible to understand another perspective without necessarily agreeing with it. Unwillingness to listen limits the pathways to finding solutions.
As aforementioned, I think the majority of the software listed does not clash with the FSF definition of freedom. Unless I started shilling Zuckerberg products I don't think it detracts from the point I'm trying to make.
To save anyone else from losing time on this bullshit:
They’re scared of their FOSS fork being forked. The rest of the article is just an attempt to make them sympathetic, and muddy the waters. That’s why GPL > BSD
A new project based on our code might implement features that are fundamentally in opposition to our ethics (e.g., damaging to privacy, human rights or to the environment). Even though we would not be associated with the project in any way, it can deeply affect how people see Vivaldi (and how we see ourselves), damaging a reputation we have taken pains to earn.
What do you mean? In most OSS that i use (surely all KDE apps) there is a donate button in the menu bar that opens a webpage with a PayPal button… I don’t know how easier could it be.
It may remove the “weakest link in the chain” and does not support surveillance capitalist companies. It also makes the software more known.
In the end the biggest cost is development, which stays the same.
I also have the feelig total normies dont annoy in forums or with bug reports / feature requests, like many Linux users do in some time of their evolution XD
Rule 4: No association with or reference to crypto“currencies” because these are greed incentivizing pyramid schemes.
They… They are app stores. Aurora is just a reskin of fdroid, they use the same repos What’s the association, the fact that they let you install apps related to it? Bruh.
Aurora isn’t a reskinned F-Droid and neiter does it use the same repositories. It’s a client for the Google Play Store, but one that doesn’t require an account or Google Services. And that’s not what F-Droid is.
The OP mentions aurora store by name so they are probably not talking about the f-droid wrapper. Also if f-droid breaks rule 4 AuroraDroid almost certainly does.
I’d expected that rule to eliminate apps like Brave (BAT), Signal (MobileCoin), Telegram (TON), etc…
Feels weird to rule out a tool because the team accepts donations via cryptocurrency when the tool itself (and presumably other tools by that same developer) has no links to crypto. Obviously this assumes that they accept donations via other means; if not then I can totally understand not wanting to use crypto to donate.
It’s funny to see someone say “I didn’t send them a donation through PayPal, a crypto exchange, because they accept donations via crypto and I’m morally opposed to crypto.”
I’m confused, as I progressed in the article I started seeing many proprietary applications being mentioned, with “free software” did you mean libre or gratis?
Not the majority, but that’s why I was confused as if they were put there by overlooking the license, anyway it makes sense now. I enjoyed the article btw!
Donations to free software projects are pretty important. Since most of big ones are maintained by companies which has a partnership with foundations, lot of most free software projects (libraries, components, apps, etc) are maintained by small amount of volunteers, who paid everything for the project.
So, this not mean to make you rich, but at least having a coffee paid by some Lemmy user who uses your piece of software and wants to be grateful, makes you a bit more happy.
Interesting project. I’m happy with Thunderbird but if I ever run into a roadblock now I know I can check out Betterbird as a potential ‘drop in’ replacement.
@mexicancartel@anguo I don't consider it unrelated at all: “What small-scale interaction will you make today, little firefly?”
Hence “every little bit counts.”
I see it more like the opposite. Even if you made some difference in timings it still syncs. Even if “firefly you” didn’t exist, it makes no difference…
“From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs” said some bloke called Karl Marx.
I donate to foss projects when I am able to, if I am not able to I do not donate to foss projects. I use the results of foss projects according to my needs which, in my case, is every single day. If foss folk lived nearer I would cook and bake for them (that’s my ability) but as that is not possible I send money to these lovely people instead.
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