I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
I’ve always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let’s change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?
I advocate for that since years. We need to normalize to pay for OSS. The biggest issue I see is not that people are unwilling to pay (donate) for the software they use daily, but the the payment itself is to complicated. There is not “the one” app store for OSS that every OS uses that makes donations easy. Additionally taking care of taxes for donations is too much of a burden, so the app store needs to handle that as well. And voila: You have the Apple App store or Android Play store.
If taxes are a concern then I think opencollective.com is the recommended platform:
“Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community. What do you want to do?”
It’s quite sad to see reasonably popular apps with virtually no funding. I feel like highlighting the case of rssguard, probably one of the most popular apps in its category, with patreon, liberapay, and offering to prioritize bugs and suggestions from donors… barely 5€ per month.
Oh, I almost forgot, in these topics there should be a mandatory mention of core-js case.
The article does indirectly mention core-js within source “31. b. Explain xkcd: 2347: Dependency.”
But yeah, the status-quo is quite sad indeed.