I’m having to register to Lemmy directly now, when I’m used to posting from KBin’s instance. But now the errors is getting so bothersome that I can’t even surf around currently on it. The 50x error comes up after everytime I post somewhere, like make a thread.
The current admin is dealing with issues at the moment and can’t always be there, which is unfortunate because it sets up KBin and it’s magazines to be contaminated with bots, spam and other problems.
The problem here is that people conflate “Free as in Speech” with “Free as in Beer”. Free Software was never about “not charging” or “pay what you want” or “donation based”. It’s about freedom to access and modify the software code if you want to do so.
The majority of people here don’t want or don’t care about this. They just want a convenient way to shitpost online. They want someone else to thanklessly devote their time and resources to the “community”, but don’t you dare thinking about making money from this.
This need to change. If we want an internet free of big corporations and focused on the interests of “the people”, then “the people” (all of them!) need to be willing to put something on the line and fund it.
I dont think thats gonna fly, honestly. We also need people to vote pro people and pro planet instead of pro billionaires or pro nationalism.
I also dont think its helpful to throw shit at the people using the software because thats how we know the software is good.
Imo, we should implement systems that fund software that attracts users without it using predatory marketing and privacy invasive. Ideally we just push taxes for large companies higher and give the funds to foss devs who attract most users/uses of their software/libraries. That should do the trick.
Speaking as someone who just received a grant from NLNet: I’m glad such a thing exists and I’m grateful that I the funds I’m getting will allow me to pay my bills for a couple of months. But if you told me 5 years ago (when ai started working on Communick) that to make a living as a software developer I’d have to depend on the whims of bureaucrats who are playing with money that is not their own, I’d just go apply to Google or go back to my Big Corp.
Centralized economies do not work. Like everything else in the world, the best measure we have to determine if software is “good” is by putting a price on it and seeing how much people want to pay for it.
Also, it’s important to point out that this does not mean that we need VC, big corporate structure or any corrupt institution to work. There are indie devs making a killing (50/70/100k€ per month) on their own because they are building something that is valuable and are not shy from charging what they know what their work is worth.
Thats valuable insight. Thank you.
I‘d like to point out that the bureucrats are a different problem we need go get rid of as well. It does not mean the idea of publicly funding this stuff is bad. I think the reason why bureaucracy takes over is lack of public oversight and influence by the people.
If you take sidestreets of law (ie bancruptcy law in some countries) you will find yourself in the wild west because only a small fraction of people ever has to take this road. The people in charge behave like warlords because normal people dont know and care.
But yes, people should dual license their shit so that corpos have to pay for it.
If you want the government to be the one financing FOSS developement, who will be in charging of managing the purse if not the bureaucrats?
Strongly disagree. If you start putting restrictions around who should have the right to Free Software, it is no longer free. It is because of shitty “source available” mentality that I, as an small indie shop, can not offer hosting for interesting solutions for other companies. If Lemmy or Mastodon were not AGPL, I would never had touched it.
there is a big difference between them holding onto the purse and them being able to put walls of paper in front of anyone trying to access it. The more transparent and voted over publicly that is, the more it should actually function.
Help me here. My understanding is that you can dual license something, for example agpl (not ever to be taken closed source) and a pay for it if you want to build something proprietary with it, no? Let me know what real world example would spell doom here.