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What if I paid for all my free software?
(www.cynicusrex.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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I hate this argument so, so passionately.
It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.
So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.
Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.
I hate this argument even more passionately. Since austerity has been eating away at all social programs..particularly ones that involve technology (which should be the correct avenue for funding FOSS software projects), we must, as citizens, financially incentivize software developers to avoid the monetization traps that exist.
Case in point: I’ve recently been working on a way of federating inventory. I’ll let you guess how viable that project is without some way of COMPLETELY UNDERMINING THE SOCIAL GOOD OF SUCH A PROJECT SIMPLY BECAUSE I HAVE TO PAY RENT AND EAT FOOD WHILE WORKING ON IT. I’ll let you guess how many different ways that I will likely need to compromise the sanctity of my vision (which should basically be an addition to the open pub/sub protocol) just to make working on it something that could support me. If my project were funded by governments and non-commercial entities, I’d be fine. But the reality is: these kinds of technologies are often compromised because of this same bullshit line of reasoning.
We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can't rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn't be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.
I don’t personally support badgering users. I’m talking about the compromises built into most of our projects that are only NECESSARY because our social programs have been scrapped.
In a sufficiently advanced socialist society, FOSS projects would be funded the same as roads. We don’t live in that system. I wish we did. We live in a system where Meta, Google, and Amazon have gigantic government contracts and they use that money to pay their devs to compromise open protocols. The reality is that indie devs with true integrity (like the ones who built the platform were having this discussion on right now) need more funding than they’re getting. I appreciate them not hounding people for money but that doesn’t eliminate the need for it..
to create a strawman argument about being “hounded” is disingenuous at best.
It's not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn't to you) was triggered by the notion that we "need to normalize paying for foss". I don't think that's true, and I do think it'd lead to generating a "tipping system". Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.
I'm also not fond of "we live in a system" as an argument for playing by the system's rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that's what the "system" is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn't mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.
Fair enough in the strawman thing.
Anyway: Either we enact social change or we literally do the thing that you said: we need to normalize users feeling obligated to pay for FOSS software.
Actually: IMO, we DO need to normalize people understanding that the reason their software doesn’t suck is because the dev has integrity and hasn’t sold out to corporate interests. They should be reminded of that fact because the pull of greed is PERVASIVE.
The way I see it,
We have two options:
A.) fix the broken FOSS system to properly fund projects that eschew monetary gains and the stockpiling and hiding intellectual property in the interest of the sanctity of these technologies.
B.) Normalize end users feeling obligated to pay.
If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn't root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling "obligated" to pay, they either won't pay anyway or won't use the software. That's not a viable option.
So you're left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is "broken" or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is... well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that's where the effort should go.
I very much agree that the social change route is for the best. However, being a cynical old man that has watched Google and others lay waste to the open internet time and again, I guarantee that we’ll have to go with the FOSS hounding route unless some new viable alternative pops up. Thanks for the spirited discussion! I think we both, in the end, want the same thing.
Yeah, for sure. I'm just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.
Well, your assumption that I heard (or I am) an anarchocaptalist is wrong. I have a lot of critics to the captalist system.
I fiercely disagree with dismantle of public policies. Actually I support free and universal healthcare system (like I have in my country), free and good educational system, free and public transportation system, and many other ideas. However all of these free stuff are paid with our taxes. It's public and free, but it's not out of charges, cause someone is paying (this case all of us).
But for this to happen, it's necessary public policies to invest public money on every one of these projects. Afterall, nothing is free.
In the other hand, we have a lot of FOSS software, that most of them is maintained by one person or a small group of persons. Maybe this software may solve an issue to a specific person, but it's not relevant to the most part of the users. There is no interest to invest public money to pay for these kind of projects, cause they don't solve anything meaningful for the majority. It does not means that the project is meaningless, but it's not relevant enough to get investment.
The maintainers of these projects have their bills to pay. If they can't pay their bills, they will certainly abandon the project to make money. It's not good for anyone.
If the FOSS community normalize paying for the apps, probably we'll have a much stronger community. But don't get me wrong, when I say "paying" I don't mean as in a closed source apps where if we don't pay, we can't use it. I mean paying like a tip. Zorin OS do this very well. Bitwarden too. Many FOSS apps do it.
Of course it will be really good if public policies support these kind of development, but it's not an easy task.
Remember, despite you and I dislike the capitalism and how society is structured today, we still live in this society and we (and the devs) have to pay our bills.
No, hey, let me be clear, I don't think you're actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.
What I do say is that the notion that "it's not free, it all comes from taxes" is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn't the same as paying for a service, and public services aren't "services you pay with your taxes", they're... well, public services.
And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it's a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you're definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that's not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that's not the same thing.
So hey, I get it, you don't ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you're still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You're right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you're willing to explore.