this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
345 points (97.8% liked)
Programming
17443 readers
237 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But you can't have one without the other. Putting a cost on software is adding a restriction, thus making it less free (as in freedom).
Free software should be available to everyone, even to people who don't have money to pay for it (poor third world countries, students, kids).
I personally believe, that you should pay for software that helps you earn money. For everything else - it's everyone's own decision to donate or not, based on a financial situation, beliefs, political position and what not.
Yeah I think that people should be a lot more willing to pay someone to contribute to open source than they are to pay for usage of closed code. It really should be seen as the best form of charity, like when I donate to an open source project that makes a good education tool what I'm really doing is donating that tool to every school in the developing world and every student that wouldn't have been able to afford a paid version.
I think that we need to get into a world where showing off which projects you support is a way of flexing, like all these super rich attention seekers need to start funding development teams for apps 'oh yeah I was so annoyed the librivox app didn't have ai search tools that I paid two PhD students to implement it, apparently it's been a real boon for foreign language learners and literary academics but I just use it to find me historic novels similar in theme to events in my own life, you know it suggested shadow over innsmouth, I don't know what it's trying to say!'
People need to see that it's much better to buy something for everyone in the world than just for you, especially because it makes it possible for other people like you to repay the favour and pay for further improvements which benefit you