The foundation of modern software is cracking under the weight of burnout.
  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

    If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

    Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

    And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

    Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

    Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

    To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️

    • illusionist@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      I like Projects that provide an IBAN. I don’t want to pay 3% to paypal or stripe just to donate to a FOSS project.

  • hitwright@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    Open source should be funded by the tax-payers, or all code should be forcibly open-source (something like AGPL)

    Any other models feels like they would create perverse incentives

    Also recurring donations feels like a better way than one-time tips

    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

      I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

      • M0oP0o@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        Same as all other tax funded projects, by some elected people who likely have no idea about the project.

        Joking aside, we will see more of this funding due to governments moving to open source software as they tend to want to fund their own stuff.

  • rockstar1215@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 days ago

    It’s funny how common this mindset is in the self-hosting community: “If I’m running it on my own hardware, the software should basically be free… maybe I’ll toss a tiny ‘tip’ if I feel generous.”

    The logic seems to be that since there’s no ongoing server cost, the developer’s time, skill, and effort must somehow be worth nothing and that we should magically fund the entire project through some hypothetical cloud version that they themselves will never use.

    It’s like showing up to a brewery with your own growler and expecting the beer to be free because you didn’t use their glass.

    • El Barto@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 days ago

      I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with this. If the software is free, then it’s free. It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

      Personally, I write code and publish it in the hopes that it will help someone. If someone comes in and says “there’s this bug, fix it!” I will only do so if it will benefit me, or if I feel like it.