- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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?
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Free on free software stands for freedom, not for free of charge.
Someone is paying for foss somehow. Maybe it’s the dev with his time and effort, maybe is an enterprise, maybe it’s a few fellows that contribute financially.
The point is: we all have to pay our bills. Someone is being charged to maintain foss.
So yes, we should normalize paying for foss.
The real outrage is big tech clouds like amazon taking open source software for free and bundling it up in AWS services that cost a lot of money.
If they would contribute back to the authors, they would become rich, but of course not…
AWS isn’t charging for the software, they’re charging to let you run stuff on their hardware
Which, by itself, is fine. But their contributions to open source are very one-handed and pale in comparison to how much they benefit out of it.
Hell, my company is no different. They allocate one day out of the year as “open source day” where devs can contribute back to open source projects on company time. But it must be something we already use.
No personal development. No non-essential libraries.
We make literally millions off of these libraries and we don’t even contribute monetarily.
If these companies gave even 0.01% of their revenue to these essential libraries, they’d never even have to ask for money.
