this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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"Free" as in "freedom", not price. There's nothing stopping somebody from making money on FOSS.
Goddam Richard Stallman really screwed the PR up on that one with the "free" thing.
The F in FOSS stands for free, IIRC. The ability to access, use, share the code, etc. has more to do with the open source part of the acronym. I haven't really seen anyone complain about Sync being closed sourced so far... Just that you have to pay not to see ads.
Ive only ever seen FOSS developers get support through donations. Which is nice and all, but likely not enough for an independent developer like ljdawson to survive on alone.
Dont get me wrong, I like FOSS apps too, but the experience almost always suffers to some degree; its easy to see why. I just don't get why Sync is being singled out like some kind of evil tech monopoly lately. As far as I can tell, its just an individual developer who released a great app for free (yes with ads, you're the product, blah blah blah) with an optional lifetime payment to disable ads completely.
Free refers to freedom, not price. No part of "FOSS" has anything to do with money or price.
Well then what's the issue? Because every complaint I've seen so far has been about the optional monetary facet.
I think people are complaining about ads because ads imply tracking. I don't know, I use Jerboa because I value the four freedoms, I'm not out here protesting non-free apps because the free apps work well enough for me.
AFAIK the way ad revenue works is dependent on trackers. Paying to remove ads on Sync also removes all trackers according to many people who have tested it; still seems to come down to not wanting to pay the developer.
Which is fine, of course. I just think framing the app as sketchy or something is completely misguided.
Donations don't generate nearly as much money as purchases. I like open source just as much as the next person, but there's no way that I could afford to drop my job and go full time into an open source project. Looking at Lemmy's donations for example, the annual budget on OpenCollective is, at this time, ~$10k (which is significantly below US minimum wage at least), and their Patreon link shows $1650/mo. It's a nice chunk of cash, but not sustainable.
One approach I've really liked is what Aseprite does. You can buy the precompiled product, or you can clone the repository and build it yourself. Most users won't build it, so they get paid and still get to share the code with the community.
Are Sync Free and Sync Paid Edition separate apps? Because if not, you still have some ad publishers framework on your phone and running. I'd guess it's Google, which means play services are required. That's a big no-go for degoogled Linux users.
The dev said that the framework is completely disabled once you purchase the ad-free version. Various people also confirmed that statement with anti-tracking software.
And companies think free in open source as in free labor.
When you figure out how to make a living writing FOSS let me know
I wouldn't sweat it too much, The fact that someone could make money on this gets in the way of their narrative.
I don't really mind that sync is closed source you should be able to have the freedom to use whatever you want and all it is is more choice but I'll be damned if I'm going to use it.
Like who? Making an actual living I mean, not just collecting small donations to 'buy them a coffee' or whatever.
Not saying you're wrong, but some examples would be welcome.
Edit: Down voting me for asking a question, lol. Way to demonstrate your dedication to that free and open philosophy you apparently advocate for, folks.
Blender, Wikipedia, Linux, RedHat and even the project you're using right now: Lemmy
There actually are a lot of people making a living out of making open source projects
Ill admit im not very familiar with blender, linux, or redhat, so ill look into those -- thank you.
My understanding is that nobody owns lemmy, rather people own the instances that make up lemmy. Which is definitely in the spirit of FOSS, but based on my understanding (happy to be proven wrong) I dont think its accurate to say the creators of Lemmy are making a living from it. You can donate to the admins of the instances you use, I suppose.
Likewise, isn't the main source of income for Wikipedia donations? They ask me for one every time I'm on the site.
So other than semantics, what's really the difference in making a donation to a service like Wikipedia, and paying for Sync? You can think of paying to remove ads as a donation if that helps, but the fact remains that lemmy is already available for free, and is much smaller than organizations like Wikipedia or Linux. Dude has got to eat.
Nope. The devs make a living out of it. They work on Lemmy full time. They are sponsored by NLnet and are paid for every feature they implement
Interesting, I didn't know that; thanks for the info.
Compleatly forgot to answer your other quesntion:
Yes the main income is donations. The difference is that you don't need to pay if you can't afford it and people who donate are generally paying more on average. The huge difference is that everyone has access to everything without paying.
Imagine what would happen if you would have to pay to use Wikipedia: nobody would use it. The content is made by users and if they would have made it a paid encyclopedia it wouldn't have any users.
Also, I gladly pay for subscriptions for services that actually cost money to run in the developer's side.
But that's not the case. It shows content from a free service. I get it that developers need to get paid, but if they don't have any recurring expenditure, it should be based on donations.
You don't need to pay for Sync if you can't afford it either, though. A free version exists, the only noteworthy difference is that it shows ads. To your point, there are technically a few gated features behind the Ultra subscription, but these are niche inclusions that 99% of people probably wouldn't use even if they were included for free. I think of them more as an added bonus for supporting the dev.
See: RedHat devs and all the FOSS orgs that actually pay devs to work on their shit.
Google, Meta, and AMD have people on their to team they pay for development on FOSS projects because their operations rely upon them, so they have a vested interest in maintaining them.
So the best solution to make a living as a FOSS developer is to... Work for some giant tech monopoly who engages in sketchy consumer practices on a regular basis?
AFAIK Sync was created by a single person, so I doubt he's getting paid by anyone other than fans of the app and ad revenue. I'll look into RedHat though, I appreciate you taking the time to provide an actual example.
Not a problem. Also FOSS orgs pay their devs as well. Off the top of my head OS developers with a large userbase often pay their devs through donations to foundations that fund the project. Often donors are companies as well, but it gives a developer the option to get paid without working for a massive company.
(I suppose indirectly they do, but that's a whole different ball of wax)
He means provide an example of a single indie Dev doing it. You're being obtuse because you know that there's no one.
I don't understand. I reread back to the top comment and went down the chain. They made a rhetorical question about how devs of software being paid. Someone clarified the definition of Foss. Then there was a an inquiry about how someone could make a living with FOSS software and another commenter claiming millions do it (which a majority are these exact devs I pointed out).
I simply gave the list, that's all.
https://opencollective.com/
Not writing, but building:
https://www.tindie.com/stores/bmoreautomation/
Open source hardware is a thing too. It's not many sales now but I'm still in the prototyping phase and actively changing things.
It's more a limitation of the english language.... No distinction between free as in beer or free as in freedom... We're stuck with the same word