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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

Every year I allocate 100.- (around 100$) to share between every geeky project I want to support.

My list includes: Lemmy, Memmy, Joplin, Wikipedia, Organic Maps, Gnome, Thunderbird, Firefox, peertube)

I could give more, but I could give less.

I’m also trying to support the Linux Experiment with Patreon.

€0.00—Aurora Store. Breaks rule 4. €0.00—F-Droid. Breaks rule 4.

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.

”Better known as Windoze”

Stopped reading right there. Edgy 14 year old script kiddies can think whatever they want. I’m not interested.

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?

The thing is

• its a shame that enthusiasts dont donate. How?
• the biggest problem is normies using FOSS and never donating a cent

Why have you listed K-9 Mail as 'No donations/premium possible' when it's possible to donate to Thunderbird of which K-9 Mail is a part of?

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.

I do that for open-source videos games, I pay for the steam version to support the creators (Dwarf Fortress and Cataclysm : Dark Days Ahead for example). I'm totally fine with it, as long as it's a one-time fee, no subscription bullshit.

No, it's not, and it's not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.

This is not a case of "no one", anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it's not just "a coffee", plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.

Thank you! More people should do this. It may seem like $5 is nothing, but it’s actually great help. Even $1 helps out FOSS projects, as if even just 1% of the users of such projects donated $1 each month that’d be able to make a good income,