I use Arch btw
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Remember kids:
Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
It's a sign that you are an adult.
I find something extremely satisfying giving money to people who are working for free and offering a superb free service. So many awesome libraries that are given to us ad free by people.
Not an adult, just have enough money
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.
Do children spend money on those?
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
So like the wikimedia or openstreetmap foundations?
For all I care the FSF could handle this actually
Thats an insane idea! Where can I sign up? Please make a post about it!
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
Thanks for mentioning its not your intent to shut me down. The issue we have isnt lack of people getting on board but every idea having millions of different people pulling them in different directions.
Example: I filed a complaint against apple for privacy violations. Seems like nobody else did it in this particular case and thats despite millions of people using their devices and being affected by this thing, even talking about it on reddit and here.
The problem really isnt getting people on board, it is pushing for stuff to become reality.
In this case, there are many stakeholders involved. Volunteers, developers on corporate payroll, etc. That alone adds complexity to any solution. Doesn't men no solution can be found, but adds to the inertia since it requires more effort
I agree. But thats also why I think its best to push as far as one can and hope for others to join or take over once the original person/people are out of steam. This works with founding companies, groups and other movements. This ultimately leads me back to my initial: please make a post, I‘ll join you. Does it make more sense now?
You mean make a post on Lemmy? For me the root problem is still here: I have no contacts in the (admittedly extremely wide) industry and could not build a platform for people to register their projects to. I can only draw the outline of how this thing would work
Edit: I'll try to write something down and make a post somewhere. Any community suggestions?
Which is no problem. Causes dont need the most connected, born leader types. They need to start somewhere is all. If its meant to be, it will grow. Everything else is perfectionism imo.
Depending on the spin, its either interesting for the fediverse, opensource or something else. You can hit me up in dms with a draft if you want.
Maybe this is a naive view, but I wouldn't mind paying a programmer to improve free software when there's something I need. Then everyone can benefit the same way I benefit from other people improving the software in similar or other ways.
For example, a while ago I realized that the OpenBSD file(1) tool didn't detect utf-8 encoding, which was something I wanted. It doesn't seem like a priority of the devs, but generally an improvement for everyone if it worked. If there was an easy way to pay a programmer to implement it for a reasonable price I could pay for that. If more people wanted the same thing we could share the cost too. Finally if the devs thought it was a feature in line with the goals of the project it could be merged into the main source code and everyone would benefit.
I wish this system of hiring programmers was easier to navigate.
That is a brilliant idea, but make a GitHub issue first so it's a known issue.
I've made a few contributions to the Linux Mint team and it's free. It has saved a few machines from the e-waste landfills and I have it on my laptop right now. It's super reliable and just works so the devs deserve the extra help.
I would pay for advanced functionality, backups and support. There is no reason a project needs a non profit status. They can make all the money in the world as long as they aren't forcing proprietary software and SaSS.
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.
Yeah! If someone was willing to make this please do!
How is that different from something like ko-fi?
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.
Oh I misunderstood. I thought the idea was to pool donations together in a group.
But ko-fi allows your to set arbitrary amounts, doesn't it?
Exactly
I'm totally okay with paying for prebuilt images of free software. It's what is meant.