You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Well yeah this presupposes that management knows what the fuck they're doing.
Which is vanishingly rare. It happens sometimes though. I worked at a small 12 man shop that had an engineer CEO who valued doing things right. Very refreshing.
Throwing more bodies at a situation does NOT solve the situation faster or more efficiently; seriously, this shit is the most remedial, 101-level shit in pretty much any field where man-hours are a measuring metric.
If you want a good back end that isn't bloated you can't use cheap contractors or junior engineers - you need someone who knows what they're doing.
It's a fight I'm constantly fighting at work. They finally dropped all the super cheap contractors that were trying to hard code a list of 20 identical entries that differed only by a single field. The contractors who thought the peak of architectural design was decomposition of any method more than 5 lines long into confusingly named functions that had an additional 10 layers of decomposition to them. The cheap contractors who thought that documentation was a waste of time and that the code was "self documenting".
These contractors weren't paid to care - I don't blame them for phoning it in. But if you want a system to work well and be cheap to run you pay your engineers well or inspire such devotion that FOSS is possible.
But the fact is the overwhelming majority of large, optimized and successful FOSS is funded by megacorps
Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don't say any of this in defense of capitalism, but "free" is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn't exist.
Life isn't a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that's true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren't like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is "FOSS means I don't have to pay anything because it doesn't cost anything! If they ask for donations they don't mean me"
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.
That may be your problem. We don't ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.