dd wrote:
I think crowdsourcing is one of the best innovations of the 21st century, the implications are huge if you think about it, and it's also a really awesome and great way to fund open source / FOSS projects.
Me too! So many amazing inovative projects are made this way
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dd wrote:
Richard Stallman, the guy behind the FSF and the GPL licenses, himself states that he thinks it's perfectly fine to charge money for free software, including GPL licensed software. I don't see the idea of FOSS as "free goodies for everyone!" but rather, that it guarantees certain freedoms to both users and developers (insofar as developers are also users). Free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer.
Indeed. Free as in beer has personally been very to me over the past few years - my partner was seriously ill and we lost 90% of our income pretty much over night. I don't know how I would have managed to get work without gimp and kdenlive and wordpress etc free of charge. We built a whole business for him to do from home, using only free software (Ethical Pets)
BUT, that said, I am a Free Software campaigner, and put volunteer hours running groups and stuff, because of the free as in freedom part... I believe in this to its core and believe it is the only ethical and logical way to work. It puts a very high value on creativity and also on kindness, international relations, social responsibility, sharing, and progressing the world together... I really love it.
And - we can have free as in beer, free as in freedom AND fund-raise using crowd-funding. These things are not opposites.
dd wrote:
Maybe they get corporate sponsors who benefit from the product and thus are willing to sponsor development for the benefit of all (too many examples to count, many FOSS projects do this).
Yes, many projects do this: but I personally prefer a large number of small donations from a wide group of users when possible - it keeps the ownership of the software clearly in the community.
dd wrote:
FOSS is all about crowdsourcing the code - anyone can contribute code to a project. So the way I see it, paying someone else to contribute code on your behalf is just an evolved form of the same thing, really.
Yes, as someone who uses only free software but does not code, the capacity to pay developers is very exiting. It's is VERY often said when explaining Free Software to non technical people that:
"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
IS relevant to them because should they wish to, they can pay someone to make the changes for them (and that those changes go "up-stream" and benefit everyone else). The number of times I have said that when running talks - but its never actually happened that way in practice... till now
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