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.
So yes, we should normalize paying for foss.
I hate this argument so, so passionately.
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.
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.
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.
The real outrage is big tech clouds like amazon taking open source software for free and bundling it up in AWS services that cost a lot of money.
If they would contribute back to the authors, they would become rich, but of course not…
AWS isn’t charging for the software, they’re charging to let you run stuff on their hardware
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.
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.
telegram mega vivaldi spotify
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.
User @QuazarOmega already 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.
I don’t really give a damn about why
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.
Regarding Vivaldi: Why isn’t Vivaldi browser open-source?
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.
Fuck off
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.
