Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
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7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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It is a bullshit false dichotomy to claim that the only options for business models are charging fees or showing ads. Knock it off with the misinformation.
What are your suggestions besides ads and subscriptions, professor?
Go ask Wikipedia about their business model. Or the Linux kernel. Or any number of other Free Software projects that neither charge users a fee nor show ads.
Those are not businesses. They are free projects which a dedicated person (or group of people) donate their time and energy to produce.
Wikipedia has their semi-annual donation drives and many (not most, but enough worth mentioning) FOSS devs are salaried by companies like Google and Microsoft and are allowed to work on patches to out-of-scope projects on company time provided they're still fulfilling their main roles. There are also Liberapay, Open Collective, Ko-fi and such but for the majority of FOSS devs not funded by large corps, just developing a large and widely-used program because they want to, donations rarely ever cover as much as they would make at a 9-5. There are also nonprofits that distribute donations to FOSS devs. For most it is a money pit, but to them the passion is worth more. They do it for the love, not the money.
These are not businesses.
...and? That's what makes them the best part of the Internet!
And it doesn't stop them from existing, proving that the Internet does not actually have to run on profit.
Yes, we could have an internet without businesses. See here.
Thats why i said “seems“ to be and „on a bigger scale“ to allow for other options. But those other options like through donations(=paying them) are often not enough. Apparently you don’t see opensource developers struggling and choose to just ignore the reality. You also fail to point out other options that scale as well as advertising does. As you seem to have the solution that many people struggle to find, feel free to actually tell us about it. I only expressed my opinion not „misinformation“. Your comment on the other hand failed to provide any arguments to further the discussion. So yeah “knock it off“
Do you have any fucking clue at all just how much money projects like Wikipedia make through donations? Do you realize that Jellyfin has even gone so far as to ask people to stop donating because they have too much money?
Your claim that advertising "scales" and donations don't is a straight-up Iie.
We can cherry-pick projects too.
Lemmy barely gets enough donations to fund a single developer.
core-js, one of the largest JavaScript libraries, was cussed out for even having the audacity to ask for donations.
Donations aren't the steady source of income you seem to be thinking they are.
Again you ignore words like “often”. There certainly are projects that are doing extremely well, and I am happy for them, i am one of those donating.
Yet you ignore the funding problem that exists in open source. You can’t make it go away by naming a few that have done well for themselves. Even those that are doing well enough, what could they achieve, if they had comparable funding to bigger players that are advertising? I am not saying that it’s the option that everybody should go for, but if one chooses to, i would like it to be privacy respecting, and thats where hopefully mozilla will come in. And outside of opensource, on a “normal” persons phone, how many apps are funded via ads? Wouldn’t it be great if those were privacy preserving instead? It’s a step in the right direction.
I will stop replying to you, as you don’t seem mature enough to hold a respectful discussion, without trying to frame my opinions as trying to be manipulative.