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CynicusRex @kbin.social

What if I paid for all my free software?

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?

91 comments

  • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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 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.

    • Constructive criticism is invaluable, so thank you. This point has been brought up multiple times by now, therefore I'm thinking of a way to incorporate it into the text. For starters a link to this Lemmy thread has already been included.

    • I added a footnote on top and added your comment to the sources because I'm low on time to write a new paragraph properly just this minute.

  • 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.

  • "From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs" said some bloke called Karl Marx.

    I donate to foss projects when I am able to, if I am not able to I do not donate to foss projects. I use the results of foss projects according to my needs which, in my case, is every single day. If foss folk lived nearer I would cook and bake for them (that's my ability) but as that is not possible I send money to these lovely people instead.

  • 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.

  • It's great to donate if you can, but if you can't, then appreciate the public good that these programmers have done and don't feel guilty for using free software for free.

    • Indeed, hence: “Support the people whose products you love when possible or fight corporate tax avoidance”.
      Moreover, giving software a shout-out, a good review, reporting bugs, or contributing to its forum is also a significant method of support.

    • You can help in other ways. Spend a few hours marketing it. Or open feature requests or bug reports. If you can, contribute a new feature.

91 comments