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Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
(davelane.nz)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?
I can handle that.
What if it weren't a donation? What if the situation were a once annual subscription where your use of the software is reliant on that subscription cost?
Yes, I realize KDE is still open source, but what if they did this anyways?
Then thats a no. I'm not getting anything embedded in my workflow that can randomly decide it can't work because the mother-ship is down or the business model needs to change.
Edit: all software business models in general need to embrace this. Charge more if ya have to or provide the essential features initially and then use nice-to-haves as the gain-winners going forward. Thats really how it should be with everything
Ideally speaking: totally not cool
Realistically speaking: they got solid stuff going, and plus you can disable it one way or another
Idealistically and realistically: Totally and absolutely cool. If anything, they have a moral imperative to keep the project going, since there are users that depend on it, and doing that requires money. As such, people will need to be informed of how to contribute, so a pop up doing just that is a good way to achieve this. Why would this not be ok, even idealistically?