[vinceguidry]

Pay for software. Plz, plz pretty plz. I will easily drop $30-50 just to try a piece of beta software whose value prop matches a need I have. You have the money, indie devs need the money way more than you do, and they need to be rewarded for greenfield development.

$100-200 for a mature tool that actually solves the problem and is sufficiently hackable is well within the bounds of what I'm willing to spend.

Devs that don't have the money for these tools have a great way to get into the software world, use FLOSS tools to greenfield a new tool and collect $30-50 from anybody interested.

Can we make this happen? It would be amazing.

[akavel]

In case of this particular software, I actually wanted to pay/donate, but couldn't find a link for this IIRC. (Or it could have been via credit card, and I didn't have a credit card.)

I'm curious if there's some way for a dev to easily add a widget/button to get paid/donated for a piece of software. Ideally, with any tax etc. problems handled too. I also created some FLOSS software, and would be cool if I could just slap a button in the Readme, or in the app itself, and have a chance to get donations if someone wants to express appreciation this way.

[vinceguidry]

Personally, for your use case, I'd just use Patreon. All the best aspects of donation and subscriptions with none of the downsides. Well, you do need to advertise, but that's inherent in any donation scheme.

Donation isn't the answer I have in mind. In the first place, there's no social onus placed on users of the software to provide compensation. I love the Free Software Foundation, and I agree with its goals. But I believe in the need for two ecosystems, three I guess if you include proprietary software. Free software and open source.

The main reason is I don't think the likes of SourceForge should be allowed to sully FLOSS with adware / malware and redistribute useful pieces of software. The business value of software needs to be accommodated. If you really do have a pure altruistic motive, coupled with the willingness to accept donations, then sure, knock yourself out.

But as an individual software developer with an economic motive, intellectual property is not a hostile concept, it's one that pays the bills. Idealism in this space isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're all by yourself.

If you have a profit motive, if you want to and are willing to treat your development activities as a service you're providing to the public, rather than artwork you release purely for public benefit, then you should use a standard dual-licensing scheme.

Note that my argument here concerns software tools. Tools aren't libraries. Tools are complicated, feature-rich graphical applications that can have business value as products all of their own. Tools may use dozens of libraries. Libraries generally don't depend on other libraries other than the standard one and if they do they typically vendor them in or statically link them.