Donationware: you must donate to use it. Not like regular optional donates.
Any real-life example of anyone doing this?
Mynoise.com allows you to do a 1 time donation of 1$ to unlock all the sounds. You then just need the email you donated with.
Screenskraper but they have to pay server costs so it makes sense.
OCCT for some fucking reason, where it doesn’t.
OCCT doesn’t require you to purchase it for personal use (although you will get a 10sec timer before you can start a benchmark/stability test), which is why i think it doesn’t count as “donationware”
Voicemeeter did that too.
But honestly i don’t really see what’s wrong. There’s a base donation for the price of the software but it just give the option to support the dev if you want…
I mean most things that rely on donation like that are just cheap indie software (I think voicemeeter was $5)
I’d take that over the awful and greedy subscriptions that cost an arm like adobe or Microsoft.
FairEmail is a privacy oriented email app on fdroid which uses donation to activate pro features. €0.10 to activate one time and €7.50 for unlimited future devices. I think it’s a pretty fair deal.
https://email.faircode.eu/donate/
It’s a fair deal, but the point is it’s not a donation. You can purchase pro features, and that’s great. But it’s not a donation if you get a product in return, that’s just a purchase.
You can use it for free, you just need to donate to get rid of the banner and to get all features.
The bare functionality is in fact free
And op asked for real life examples and that is what this person is answering to
Not sure if it would count. But https://fritzing.org/download/ Went to pay it or ?compile it yourself? with version 1.0.
I think FreeFileSync does make some additional features available when you donate, which I don’t think would otherwise be available.
It’s free software. You can charge money for distribution of free software but if the user does then he has the right to have acces to the source code forever no restrictions. And that user is free to distribute copies of the software as he wishes.
You can charge money for distribution of free software
That copy is Paidware.
but if the user does then he has the right to have acces to the source code forever no restrictions
No. FOSS licenses provide protections/rights over the source code to the user regardless if that user paid for it/a pre-compiled binary or not.
Even in a scenario where the source is restricted-access FOSS the license still grants those protections without exception. Moreover a restricted-access FOSS model goes against the very nature of FOSS, even if it’s not explicitly forbidden by the license. This kind of model is typically referred to as commercial open-source software (COSS).
This approach is essentially commercial proprietary software but they messed up by picking the wrong license.
