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. ♥️
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
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.
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.
If only there was a way to fund open source projects so we both could have better software for the world and paid employees…
I think you can guess which government body already do this. Just take a shot.
Big question is: how many of us are funding foss projects?
It isn’t difficult, and with how popular some are, it wouldn’t be long before the projects could hire one or more full time devs at good rates.
I support a few big projects I use every month through liberapay.
I think the bigger question is how many corporations are supporting foss projects? I’m sure a lot of us contribute a bit here and there if we can and I’m sure it makes a difference - but if some of these corporations, making billions of dollars profit, contribute just a tiny fraction of their wealth it could make a huge difference.
It’s the same argument as recycling, turning off lights, walking instead of driving etc. etc. - yes there are 8 billion of us and if we all do it, it will make a difference, but the difference we make is still not significant compared to corporate greed.
We are being gaslit to accept yet another scenario where we socialize the cost and privatize the profit.
