1y ago

paying for free software

54 comments

How often does one pay for free/libre software? Unless choosing to send a voluntary contribution to a project, which is not the same as paying in my eyes, it sure has not happened to me in over 25 years when it was easier to order a set of CDs than trying to download the ISOs on a 56k modem.
- Unless choosing to send a voluntary contribution to a project, which is not the same as paying in my eyes
  Why is voluntary contribution not paying?
  
  A payment is compensation for a debt, and a donation is a gift. The word pay is often used when the compensation is compulsory.
- Certain open source projects will sell binaries along with some level of support so that you don't have to compile it yourself.
  
  I'm fine with that as long as it isn't a proprietary version of the project (cough, Rustdesk, cough)
- How often does one pay for free/libre software?
  Companies signing up for RHEL subscriptions pay for free software (they technically also do when signing up for Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copycats but those usually don't contribute upstrem).
  For regular consumers, the same is true when buying a Steam Deck.
  I bought Krita on the Windows Store to get seamless updates and also fund the project after I asked for an improved text utility and the reply was "Have you donated?".
  
  Signing up to RHEL is paying for support. True but missing the mark.
  I saw this post as "avoid adware. Donate to freeware/FOSS."
  There's plenty of people who donate to free apps. VLC comes to mind.
  
  They are paying for support, not the software itself. A long time ago you could go to the store and buy a box containing the CDs for Mandrake Linux as an example just like you can do with windows right now. You were not paying for the software itself but for the media and the box. Even when you pay for a binary on windows, you pay for the service of them compiling it and making it available to you, not the software itself since it is free/libre.
- I paid for a binary of Ardour (music production software). The version in my distro's repo was very outdated and had bugs, and I wasn't able to successfully compile it myself.
  
  Where did you buy it from?

It's a sign that you are an adult.
- Not an adult, just have enough money
  
  It's an interesting point! would children with enough money pay for something that is free?
- 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.

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.
  
  How is that different from something like ko-fi?

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?
  
  Thats an insane idea! Where can I sign up? Please make a post about it!
- I think everyone does this manually or using recurrent donations like LiberaPay.

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 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.

I'm totally okay with paying for prebuilt images of free software. It's what is meant.

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.

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.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

54 comments