Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Discuss how to promote using FLOSS to make music.

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Ricardus
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by Ricardus »

This is one of those areas where people need to learn that what is true for you, isn't necessarily true for other people. And it seems to be the one lesson people very often don't learn.

If you don't like people "begging for donations," then don't do it. But everyone else in the world is entitled to do whatever they want to.

OK... so I don't like blue shirts. Somehow I have the right to declare I don't like blue shirts on forums, and imply because I don't like them, everyone else should not like them, too, just because I say so?

Complete and utter nonsense.

What's true for you isn't necessarily true for others.
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by raboof »

Sort of on-topic, I recently stumbled upon this article about money and open source. Though not all of it applies to the kind of projects in the open source musicians space (a lot doesn't), I found it a good read (though it provides no clear-cut answers).
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by wolftune »

Wow, Dan, that is a very interesting perspective.

I have a substantial interest in this as I have dedicated nearly the last year of my time with NO income for it and PAID others in order to develop a better system to address these very issues.

Begging is obnoxious, I agree with you. The probably is that if you don't beg, you struggle and stick with working in your spare time while having some lousy or maybe not so lousy day-job. If you do beg, it does bring up this guilt-trip issue and it is hard to figure out the justifications given all the different contributors.

Furthermore, I agree with you, Dan, that free software, while the purpose is free-as-in-FREEDOM (i.e. whatever you pay or not, you aren't restricted once you have the software), the value of GRATIS, i.e. free-of-charge is substantial. It DOES matter that people can access things without hassle or expense. The building of the community and the availability to those with less wealth is significant. Still, the world of free software is NOT about free-as-in-price so you really shouldn't tell people who want money to take a hike. It is perfectly acceptable in free software to say: I want to get rich making software that does not restrict people. I personally have much more respect for those who want to make things free-of-charge and to remove barriers to access in addition to not being restrictive, but those issues are bigger and outside of just the issues of free-software.

Anyway, it is of fundamental importance that we DO get developers paid so they can pay their bills and keep doing this. The problem is that we need a reliable and collective system where we all come together to do our part rather than doing it out of guilt etc.

Another way to put this: I personally think most ads are absolutely obnoxious. Some people suggest ads are fine because they support products, people have to get paid etc. but I say NO GET THESE ANNOYING ADS OUT OF MY FACE AND OUT OF EVERYONE ELSE'S FACE. 99% of advertising is awful! But the answer isn't only "stop advertising" the answer is to have other better ways for our economics and our information about products to be available.

Anyway, we're far from ready, but Snowdrift.coop aims to be the complete solution, including being cooperatively run so as to give all these different views a say in how we make our community and free software development sustainable.

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Kati Maya
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by Kati Maya »

I haven't read all the posts in this thread but the only one I noticed that annoyed the crap out of me was cyberbegging in order to download Ardour. I wanted to try that one out but the cyberbegging thing really rubbed me the wrong way. Try entering $0 in the donation and clicking to download and you'll see cyberbegging come on full-force.

However most of the time it doesn't bother me much at all. I don't mind people asking for donations.
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by wolftune »

Kati Maya wrote:I haven't read all the posts in this thread but the only one I noticed that annoyed the crap out of me was cyberbegging in order to download Ardour. I wanted to try that one out but the cyberbegging thing really rubbed me the wrong way. Try entering $0 in the donation and clicking to download and you'll see cyberbegging come on full-force.

However most of the time it doesn't bother me much at all. I don't mind people asking for donations.
Indeed, Ardour is the only one I know of that is obnoxious about it to the point of surely hurting the size of the user base as people opt not to try it.
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by varpa »

If you want Ardour without the prompting for donations you can get it pre-compliled from many distros (e.g AVLinux or kxstudio, or really nearly all distros, though you won't always get a recent version) or compile from git.
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Re: Please, stop the FLOSS donation guilt trips and begging!

Post by Shadow_7 »

I don't have any issues donating to things that can make me money, if I have the money. Like microsoft office back in the day so my resume was compatible with what those who hire would want and expect. Truth be told, FOSS doesn't always produce the results that others want and expect. Even though they are functionally capable of the job that needs to be done.

I used to make DVDs in linux, but that involves several different software elements to get from point A to point B. At least four different packages to download, and several unique applications in each package. Each with a unique learning curve on the user end. So if I donate there, where do I allocate funds? The optical burning software? The video editing software? The image editor to make the menus? The DVD Authoring software? Or is there a general fund that figures that out for me?

I have no problem with people asking for donations. But when they cross a line, donate or I'm jumping off a bridge, I kind of shy away from that.
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