[ghostpepper]

> 4. Has an audience that is demonstrably more likely to pay for software

The flip side of this is that I've noticed software written solely for macOS/iOS is often more polished than many of the most popular FOSS projects written for Linux.

Obviously I don't have any expectation of software provided for free, but as someone who makes a living developing software I do find it funny how much reticence there is among other developers to pay for high quality software.

[Zambyte]

I have an aversion for paying for artificially scarce things. I am happy to "pay for software" if that software doesn't exist yet, and what I'm actually paying for is the labor to make it.

[blueboo]

Quite convenient that you’d only pay software if developers contacted you years in advance, and none of them were clever enough to do so

[Zambyte]

My mechanic doesn't speculatively contact me about work I should do on my car. If I want new software that I can't write myself, I should reach out to developers, not the other way around.

[internetter]

Does this extend to books? movies? games?

[Zambyte]

I would extend it to the words in a book, but not the book itself. That is a physical object and therefore has real scarcity. Similarly for movies and games.

Though I'm actually not against paying for access to stream media. I am however against telling people what they can do with the media once they stream it (ie saving it to their own drive for future playback).

[internetter]

So if you're not against paying for access to media, why are you against paying for access to software? If you're against DRM, that's an argument I can support more

[internetter]

I am a developer who likes to be paid for my work. I was also a diehard FOSS fan. I've also switched to macOS, and after I did so I spent probably $200 on software. What was interesting to me is that even in my Linux phase, some proprietary software was acceptable — notably steam. Why was this the case?

I think, as a developer, I value the ability to fix things I don't like. I've done it quite a lot in open source software. Just plant my fix and move on. Steam always felt complete. macOS software often feels closer to completion, though sometimes I do wish I could modify it still. Also, another class is software I trust that I could not do a better job on, like Affinity.

Anyway, I think that's the root of the developer aversion to paying for software.... Well, for me anyway. I wish we had better culture around donating to free software as well.