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by PeterZaitsev 907 days ago
Here we go again. Open Source, as currently defined is hard to monetize, so lets go ahead and call Open Source something which makes it easy. Note though Easy Monetization was never goal of Open Source, so why not instead leave Open Source alone and focus on defining something different, which is focused on being easy to monetize.
1 comments
sjfjsjdjwvwvc 907 days ago
Yea open source developers who want to get paid or make a living from their work can suck it, damn fools what did they expect!
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PhilipRoman 907 days ago
My impression is that many of these "open source developers" overestimate the value of their code. There are many amazing projects for which I would pay considerable price, but the long tail of 99% of projects just aren't worth anything in my opinion. It is an interesting exercise though - to imagine how much I would pay for my window manager, gcc or even Vim.

Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance. Of course, adding monetary incentives opens a whole new can of worms, so maybe the current situation is the best we can do after all. I suspect that many good qualities of open source software come from lack of money involved - there is no telemetry, no dark patterns to keep you using it, no attempts at vendor lock-in.

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Qwertious 907 days ago
>Maybe easier transactions of tiny sums is the real solution? Even if every user paid something trivial like 10 cents a month, it would be a huge revenue stream for popular projects which lack maintenance.

This is exactly what the Free Software world needs, IMO. More specifically, it needs to be trivially easy to use and built into the distro - i.e. you have a utility that keeps track of what you desktop apps etc you use, asks priorities+budget then generates a breakdown of how much money to send each project. Then it lets you one-click pay, instead of having to individually go to all the websites and donate to each.

Free Software can't be gratis, if we ever want it to be sustainable and prioritize the user.

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