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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Do you even know anything about Linux? It's a multi billion dollar industry! Small projects which don't have financial support will eventually stagnate and then die. It's inevitable, because food is not free.
Every decent open source project should have a robust monetisation scheme.
Yeah man, Debian has no future. Food ain't free, someone get them a robust monetisation scheme, a corporate sponsor! Otherwise they'll stagnate. No idea how they managed to hold on for 30 years without any of that, the poor fellows. /s
~~I actually wrote two long ass responses to this but lemmy bugs caused both of them to be deleted before I could hit send. Good thing, actually, because I can summarize them in a paragraph.~~ EDIT: well nvm, I ended up typing an equally long one all over again....
Lichess, Stockfish, Tachiyomi, and in the world of Linux, Debian; all these are proudly open-source, proudly non-commercial, going nowhere any time soon, and no corporate daddy. To commercialize itself or seek a profit motive would be completely against lichess' purpose, and it's the darling of the chess community - not likely to disappear one fine day, is it now?
Sure, open-source projects can monetize and there's nothing wrong with that - that's down to the ethos of each individual project. But for so many of these projects, doing exactly what you're suggesting would be completely antithetical to their culture and ethos, even their purpose of existing!
I'm just so tired of this "only corporations and self-interested motives will get us anywhere" attitude. It's so fundamentally blind, so disrespectful to the ingenuity of the human spirit and its desire to strive for the common good. The fact is, many strong and robust projects which have contributed to the good of humankind and are more than just "decent" exist, for no other reason than someone simply wanting to write something cool, or make the world a better place. And they will continue on for a long time, for those same reasons.
I did not expect to read some nonsense that sounds like it came out of a 90's era Microsoft executive's mouth (complete with "food is not free", my god) on lemmy. I expected to read it even less on the piracy community. Steve Ballmer, is that you?
I just finished reading a manga that was translated by random people from a certain anonymous cloverleaf website, for no other reason than they wanted to - not for money, not even to have their names attached to the damn thing, because they're identified only as "anon".
The view of the world put forth in this comment denies that what I just experienced is even possible, sticks its fingers in its ears and tries its best to ignore some of humanity's best work (because acknowledging it would be fatal to the central hypothesis). All to insist that selfishness is the best way forward and that we need the powerful and mighty, the vagaries of money, to give us lemmings purpose in life. It is just such a profoundly sad, empty way of looking at life, I genuinely don't know what to say...
I totally agree with this. And I think it actually shows a lot about people in general, and their attitude to life.
I totally understand how can someone arrive at a conclusion that unless you can monetize or fund something, it will eventually get nowhere. But that also says a lot about the person saying that, and unfortunately is pretty common - that just a mere though of doing something for free, or for others without any compensation is basically unimaginable, and people like that will never get it.
But then you have passionate people doing volunteers for free, or creating entire events for a subculture they love while at a loss or without any kind of compensation for their (large amounts) of time and work. I'm a part of few such projects, mostly as a DJ, and I always find it really weird and surprising when I'm reading though posts or comments related to DJing where hourly rate or how much should they ask for a first gig is such a common topic. It never crossed my mind, and the communities I'm helping with are all run by volunteers without any compensation, just because they are passionate for their subculture.
Because even if you're working a day job, there is still a lot of free time left for you to offer into something you really care about. It's understandable that some people don't want to offer it to others for free (or can't even imagine how someone would be willing to do that, and probably even think that they are stupid to do so), but I'm really glad that some people are willing to do that - and that's what the FOSS community is about.
It's always saddening when I hear someone say "You could be making so much money for that! Just monetize it a little...", but it's also a really good judge of character. People are people, I guess.
Thank you for your work :)
Thanks for taking the effort of writing out what I think.
This all-pervasive thinking that if a company employs some people to work on some community FLOSS project then we should all accept that that project would never had gotten anywhere if not for the almighty capital is so stupid. Especially since if it's the reverse, like look at when Bethesda games only being a thing at this point because of its modders, but the company owns the IP so we should all thank the company.
If the community owns the IP and some companies contribute the barest minimum or even just donate to the project, boom, it's a capitalist commercial success since they "bankrolled" the project.
If it's the other way around, a company puts out some mediocre software (seriously Beth, metro cars as hats?) and the community makes it something magnificent, then again, the achievement is the corporation's, since they own the IP, right?
Most of human achievement was either independent of, predating, or even achieved in the spite of capitalist corporations. They are a tool, not the almighty saviour.
Amen!
TL;DR, this is the summarized version? lol
Well, when I wrote that I expected that I would keep it short, but I ended up basically writing everything that was lost all over again... such is life. I'll edit to clarify
I don't know what Lichess is, but Debian has plenty of beefy sponsors, including Google and HP. Their monetisation strategy is sponsorship and it works. But they still have monetisation, that's the thing.
I'll be honest, I didn't think about that kind of sponsorship. In my comment I was thinking of something more like the sponsor relationship between Red Hat and Fedora. However... this thread started with you saying Gitea has no future because
Which it definitely does, and is. Gitea also does have sponsors in the same sense as Debian that you mentioned, though not giants like Google or HP.
I also think that saying small projects necessarily stagnate and die is wrong, though, as my other examples show.
I just checked your three examples. All of them accept donations of various forms and Lichess also has a merch shop :)
Oh, by the way, your previous point about piracy. You might not be aware, but it's a huge industry as well with plenty of money going around.
Again, that's fine? You said Gitea has no future because there's no company trying to sell premium features behind it. A merch shop and donations aren't remotely similar to the relationship between Canonical and Ubuntu, and aren't commercializing the project or making its fundamental purpose profit-driven.