Re:Excerpts from Richard Stallman's talk in Mandya, India
by mikekchar on Monday April 22, 2019 @12:38AM
(#19716572)
That is absolutely hilarious. I did the exact same thing... I don't know... 20 years ago. Same result :-) To be fair, I have paid for some free software, but it can be a bit tricky. As soon as I can wrest my wife's credit card away from her (I don't have one myself :-( ), I intend to pay for https://sourcehut.org/ even though I don't use it at the moment. It's exactly what I want someone to build. I hope he does a good job! Not affiliated in any way, but I want it to be true that he can make a living doing that.
Programmers need to stop looking at the most negative pathological potential that involves not getting paid and then extrapolating that it will be true for everyone in the pool of prospective customers. (That and also stop feeling burned when someone either takes a path that involves not paying or just doesn't bite at all). The sandwich shop doesn't have to capture 100% of the revenue that could be generated by the passing traffic. They just need to do well enough to keep the lights on.
And stop focusing on open source versus commercial software, or how to "run an open source project" and find funding for it. Start selling software that's incidentally open source.
In 2017, I decided that I would (a) start paying for more software, and (b) never again pay for any program that didn't come with source code. (I.e., not even necessarily free software—they just need to have published the source somewhere.) The consequence of that is that I've paid a total of $0 since then. Know how many times I've bought pizza in that time period?