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paying for free software
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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How often does one pay for free/libre software? Unless choosing to send a voluntary contribution to a project, which is not the same as paying in my eyes, it sure has not happened to me in over 25 years when it was easier to order a set of CDs than trying to download the ISOs on a 56k modem.
Why is voluntary contribution not paying?
A payment is compensation for a debt, and a donation is a gift. The word pay is often used when the compensation is compulsory.
A payment is the tender of something of value, such as money or its equivalent, by one party to another in exchange for goods or services provided by them, or to fulfill a legal obligation or philanthropy desire.
Certain open source projects will sell binaries along with some level of support so that you don't have to compile it yourself.
I'm fine with that as long as it isn't a proprietary version of the project (cough, Rustdesk, cough)
Companies signing up for RHEL subscriptions pay for free software (they technically also do when signing up for Oracle Linux and the other RHEL copycats but those usually don't contribute upstrem).
For regular consumers, the same is true when buying a Steam Deck.
I bought Krita on the Windows Store to get seamless updates and also fund the project after I asked for an improved text utility and the reply was "Have you donated?".
Signing up to RHEL is paying for support. True but missing the mark.
I saw this post as "avoid adware. Donate to freeware/FOSS."
There's plenty of people who donate to free apps. VLC comes to mind.
I don't think it's missing the mark because one big reason to sign with Red Hat is that in many cases RH is the actual developer, not just some technician who does the install.
Yep. Funds directly go to RHEL staff and project dev
Uhhh they are the developers of the distro (so the packaging mechanism and the build infrastructure which builds and installs packages.) But the kernel and the cli tools / libraries and the applications are not written by them.
Bro, look up what Red Hat develops before making such a comment. All that development is only funded because RHEL costs money.
They are paying for support, not the software itself. A long time ago you could go to the store and buy a box containing the CDs for Mandrake Linux as an example just like you can do with windows right now. You were not paying for the software itself but for the media and the box. Even when you pay for a binary on windows, you pay for the service of them compiling it and making it available to you, not the software itself since it is free/libre.
So nobody is ever paying for free software by your ridiculous definition.
I paid for a binary of Ardour (music production software). The version in my distro's repo was very outdated and had bugs, and I wasn't able to successfully compile it myself.
Where did you buy it from?
ardour.org
Makes sense! I have it from the Debian repo but haven't set up my studio space and got deep into it yet. What were the issues you were having from the older repo version?
I don't remember it well, it was probably around 3 years ago. IIRC I had issues with looping.