I have an idea:
OnlyDesks. It’s an onlyfans account for FOSS devs. Not a different site, just a straight up only fans account. You sub to it, and you get to watch a FOSS dev sit at their desk and do their stuff. You cannot interact with them, you can just check in on the webcam, like those sites where you can see the cats in a rescue. The feed is randomized, so whenever they’re live (does OF do live?), it is completely random which dev you’ll get, but you can go back through the past videos to see your favorite moments (opening yet another can of monster energy yet) again and again.
If all the Linux users sign up for the 9.99 a month tier, we’ll have the year of the Linux desktop in no time!
The “free” in FOSS does not mean price.
Yeah, but, it does.
Yes, you might be able to ask for money for the service of distributing or servicing GPL code. But then again: if it’s not actually free as in free beer, nobody’s going to use it.
Check out this article: https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-Open-Source-Entwickler-arbeiten-sich-an-AI-Bugs-krank-11308345.html
Curl currently has a whopping 23 sponsors. Curl. You know, that basic piece of software shipped on pretty much every single device running some form of Linux-based OS.
The same goes for pretty much every project, especially those that aren’t directly user-facing.
I was just being pedantic and corrected what is meant by the term “free software”, not actually arguing for or against what you were saying :)
Yes, of course, a project being paid will mean that a lot fewer people will actually use it. I wouldn’t say nobody, though. As an example, there’s the DeArrow browser addon which is free, but costs $1 once (with easy ways to circumvent that payment). Yet many people have paid for it anyway.
As for curl, the article says that the 23 sponsors you mentioned are only corporate sponsors. There are hundreds of people donating to the curl project, which is probably still unreasonably low, but not as dire as “only 23” would suggest. Obviously each of these donates a much lower amount, so it may still not amount to much (but I don’t know enough to say that).
But in the end, as I said, you’re probably mostly right, there would be very few users of free software if it was paid. Although there are also lots of users of proprietary paid software, so who knows.
Yeah, “nobody” was obviously a bit polemic, but if you’d have to pay the same money for FOSS as for CSS, I doubt many people would pay for e.g. Gimp over Photoshop.
Also, there’s the structure issue. Windows is developed mostly in-house, and the few bits they don’t DIY they pay for.
An average Linux distro is developed by easily over 1000 individual little projects. And yes, theoretically people could pay for Fedora, and the Fedora people then pay a whole tree of dependant projects, but that would be incredibly complicated.