I just donated to Voyager, my Lemmy client.
How often does one pay for free/libre software? Unless choosing to send a voluntary contribution to a project, which is not the same as paying in my eyes, it sure has not happened to me in over 25 years when it was easier to order a set of CDs than trying to download the ISOs on a 56k modem.
Unless choosing to send a voluntary contribution to a project, which is not the same as paying in my eyes
Why is voluntary contribution not paying?
A payment is compensation for a debt, and a donation is a gift. The word pay is often used when the compensation is compulsory.
Certain open source projects will sell binaries along with some level of support so that you don’t have to compile it yourself.
How often does one pay for free/libre software?
Companies signing up for RHEL subscriptions pay for free software (they technically also do when signing up for Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copycats but those usually don’t contribute upstrem).
For regular consumers, the same is true when buying a Steam Deck.
I bought Krita on the Windows Store to get seamless updates and also fund the project after I asked for an improved text utility and the reply was “Have you donated?”.
Signing up to RHEL is paying for support. True but missing the mark.
I saw this post as “avoid adware. Donate to freeware/FOSS.”
There’s plenty of people who donate to free apps. VLC comes to mind.
Signing up to RHEL is paying for support. True but missing the mark.
I don’t think it’s missing the mark because one big reason to sign with Red Hat is that in many cases RH is the actual developer, not just some technician who does the install.
They are paying for support, not the software itself. A long time ago you could go to the store and buy a box containing the CDs for Mandrake Linux as an example just like you can do with windows right now. You were not paying for the software itself but for the media and the box. Even when you pay for a binary on windows, you pay for the service of them compiling it and making it available to you, not the software itself since it is free/libre.
You were not paying for the software itself but for the media and the box. Even when you pay for a binary on windows, you pay for the service of them compiling it and making it available to you, not the software itself since it is free/libre.
So nobody is ever paying for free software by your ridiculous definition.
I paid for a binary of Ardour (music production software). The version in my distro’s repo was very outdated and had bugs, and I wasn’t able to successfully compile it myself.
It’s a sign that you are an adult.
It’s an interesting point! would children with enough money pay for something that is free?
I know it’s not necessarily applicable, but your comment made me think of those Stanley mugs.
IMO we all should - pay for Free software. I won’t mind if devs start putting a price tag on their work, and it should be the norm to donate to our most-used FOSS projects. I’m just having problems deciding who to donate to, because if all the stuff we use on Linux day in, day out were for pay, I couldn’t afford it
We should have some kind of FOSS payment group. You pay 10 dollars each month and you can add projects, which share your donation. I would be broke if I had to donate seperatly for them all. This of course isn’t perfect but seems like a great start
A cool app or would be where you tell it how much money you can spare to donate to projects and it tells you how much to give to each of them based on how much time you spent using them. You could even go on to combine this with others on a website, so that the payouts to each project are bigger. There are so many people like us who want to donate to our favorite projects but don’t because it feels too complicated. It could make a huge difference.
I thought you still have to pay separately on ko-fi?
I think they were saying, you pay $10 a month and it gets split up by the projects you use.
Good that you mention it! Is there a tool that helps me list all of the open source tools I use and divide a fixed donation (say 1% of my income) between them?
That could even be further improved by keeping usage statistics of the software I run.
That way I‘d probably support my OS the most but the more useful stuff would also get more donations.
If that spread, income streams would steadily increase.
Edit: now another idea came to me. How about a pact like the fedi pacts for behaving a certain way? Just with donating 1% of income/profit to open source projects you use. That could become a trend and probably change open source A LOT.
The problem is always how you divide, particularly for libraries. It is hard to rightly estimate. For better or for worse, we should have a union of open source developers and they should divide it up. Just pay the union and they will share that democratically amongst themselves, deciding their own criterias, sorting out edge cases, having a way to process disagreements, etc
It’s not as simple as having an idea. Everyone can have great ideas, the problem is getting everyone on board and figuring everything else out. I’m not a FOSS dev so I don’t have a foot in the community to pitch that. Don’t mean to shut you down but it is probably more complicated than I made it out to be, otherwise it would probably exist in some shape
