You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don’t say any of this in defense of capitalism, but “free” is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn’t exist.
Life isn’t a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that’s true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren’t like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is “FOSS means I don’t have to pay anything because it doesn’t cost anything! If they ask for donations they don’t mean me”
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.
That may be your problem. We don’t ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.
I’m fine with this trend.
Servers aren’t free and engineers aren’t cheap. Online products need to make money in our world.
If you’re not paying them they need something to sell to someone else.
Problem is that some companies double dip. Pay for the service and have your data sold.
You are naive if you think paying them prevents them from getting more payments by selling your data wherever they can get away with tricking you into consent.
Servers aren’t free but it’s damn cheap if you don’t bloat up your backend
And the way you don’t bloat your backend?
Expensive engineers
Or it’s a FOSS solution.
Whenever I see FOSS offered as a solution I have to wonder if that person is paying for their own food, shelter, transportation and what have you, or if they are still living with their parents and not making any attempt to support themselves.
Nothing is free. There is a cost incurred at some point. The minimum cost is time, a finite commodity for all living beings, and effort, but other things require materials, which cost someone some time and effort to find, extract, or otherwise produce.
I certainly don’t say any of this in defense of capitalism, but “free” is a nonsense concept in human life. It simply doesn’t exist.
Hi, software engineer here. FOSS is a blessing and only fucking morons push against it.
Yes, developers need to be compensated, but it IS NOT ethical, correct, or even basically good to do that by being a predator towards your customers.
Life isn’t a zero sum game where you have to optimize material wealth. Some people do things for others just because they like doing it, because they have the means to do so, or because they simply want to help others.
Sure, there are costs involved, but that’s true for literally everything if you account for opportunity cost. The vast majority of people choose to waste time completely unproductively, with no objective benefits to their lives (often with objective disadvantages), so is it hard to imagine that some people aren’t like that and instead choose to help/provide for others whole perhaps having some other non-material benefits like learning something or just becoming liked within a community?
Doing something because you want to is vastly different from expecting everything to be free.
That’s the wrong kind of free
this post glows
Yeah, lemmy is insanely illogical on this topic. Services cost money to run, and the average user is not going to self host anytime in the foreseeable future. I have yet to hear anybody offer a vision of how things might reasonably work without ads OR subscriptions.
The argument as far as I can tell is “FOSS means I don’t have to pay anything because it doesn’t cost anything! If they ask for donations they don’t mean me”
Not a single one of them have a monthly contribution to their instance though. Guaran-fucking-tee it.
For our instance, the users have in fact donated and keep us running. I’m not sure why you’d think users are unwilling to donate.
Because I’ve regularly got in arguments with people who refuse to donate.
The ratio of leachers to seeders in torrents is a similar issue - and seeding is practically free.
Asking $12/yr for software seems like pulling teeth to some.
That may be your problem. We don’t ask for anything specific. We simply make a post with how much the service costs and how much users have donated. Users are smart and can take things from there.
I’m not running an instance I’m talking about generalities not specifics.
Between this and the sheer amount of pro piracy, i’m honestly convinced people on Lemmy are cheap fucks.
I can understand not having anything and not wanting to pay. I get it.
But don’t act like it’s free just because you can’t afford it.
They can just fuck off