Comment on Paying people to work on open source is good actually

• CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The problem is companies that fully take advantage of open source, as is their right, and then fully expect the volunteer dev to provide support them when they have a Sev 1.

  Sure they read the license and saw that it was free, but they didn’t read the part that it was free but offered literally no support.

  The amount of money that my company has made on the backs of open source developers is probably in the literal billions. But we don’t give fuck squat to them outside of one day a year that we contribute code back to a few select libraries.

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• Meowoem@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I’m really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn’t have been able to afford a paid version.

  I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps ‘oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn’t have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it’s been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don’t know what it’s trying to say!’

  People need to see that it’s much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you

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• lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).

  Don’t confuse “free from cost” with “free from restrictions”.

  Writing software costs costs - be them time, money, evne mental health as we have often seen because of too many entitled people in these communities. Putting a price on the software means valuing it for what it is, and does not incur in any additional restriction on the usage of the software.

  All that said, I think the cost of free software, at least when it comes to infrastructure software, is something that shouldn’t be necessary for the end user to pay. Similar to how we pay taxes, instead of paying for the installation of semaphores on our streets directly.

  If I were to design any such global system, it would be eg.: distro maintainers who would pay a maintenance cost to the developers of the dependencies they ship. Probably in the form of a funding pool that is distributed across projects prioritizing those that 1.- have ethics and development practices more similar to the distro’s and 2.- are in need of more immediate attention for solving security or usability bugs.

  Furthermore, national-level funds for this would be collected via a taxation system managed by an academic office or other such entity and taken in a measure scaled according to the nation’s average technological “estate” (after all, developing and maintaining a more complex system requires more cares and attentions).

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• grumpy_graph@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • janAkali@lemmy.one ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Well, then you have to find another name for that kind of software and define it that way. I certainly would support such an effort, i.e. to make software available to everyone at no cost.

    There’s no need to come up with new terms or change the existing ones. Free software is inherently can’t have a price without the restriction put in place to require you to pay it. Here’s a quote from www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html :

    With free software, users don’t have to pay the distribution fee in order to use the software. They can copy the program from a friend who has a copy, or with the help of a friend who has network access. Or several users can join together, split the price of one CD-ROM, then each in turn can install the software. A high CD-ROM price is not a major obstacle when the software is free.

    Free software can have a price, but paying it is optional.

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• Adanisi@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You definitely can. “Free” refers to the freedom of the users, not the freedom of people who might want to be users (that doesn’t even really make sense, how can you provide the freedoms to people who don’t even use the program?).

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  • janAkali@lemmy.one ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I mean that free software is inherently can’t have a price. Even if you provide source code only to your users, they are free to share that source code for free. Thus there can’t be piracy because piracy of free software is inherently allowed. And if you try to prevent your users from sharing the source either legally or with drm - you add restrictions to software, making it less free for your users. The recent situation with RedHat provides good demonstration and example of this.

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    • Adanisi@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, the users can redistribute however they like. That doesn’t stop you charging an initial fee (and most people would probably rather get software from the official source)

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