12 ms·

One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be ma

One of the reasons that I switched from Linx to OSX was so that I could pay for more of my software. Why? Because then I more of the software I used could be maintained by someone who had the time to dig into bugs and UI problems and to fix them. But in Linux, couldn't I just edit the source myself? Realistically, no. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to source-dive in a totally new project in a language I never use, especially without someone willing to give me a walkthrough of the architecture and fundamental models of the program. It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job. A developer targeting OSX knows they have an audience of people willing to pay him money so he can spend his whole day doing usability tests and his evening watching a little league game. I do miss strace though.

wazoox 8y ago
I use Linux and most free software projects allow donations. I even donated to projects I don't actually use, like FreeBSD. I donated money to many free software projects, Ardour, Mozilla, LibreOffice, OpenBSD, etc. This is clearly a false dichotomy.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Try to pay for a mortgage with donations.
  - wazoox 8y ago
    99% of paid apps developers can't make end meet anyway. Another false dichotomy. Creating an app and sticking a price on it isn't a business model any more than creating an app and asking for donations. Both are almost certain failure. But people constantly hear about this guy or that company that made some huge success and became rich; nobody talks about the millions who failed and whose apps were simply forgotten. Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations. So that definitely can pay the bills, but the same reasoning applies: it's only true for a small minority, and you can't count on it.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      > Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations. They do, but they also get sponsoring from many governments across the globe, do continuous street actions trying to get people to donate for them´, and after a certain age most people end up leaving to some positions with more stability.
- ropeadopepope 8y ago
  The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. MacOS devs do and will go out of their way to make sure their software is not just usable, but a sheer pleasure to use in every way possible. Yes, there are exceptions (I'm looking at you, Apple, with your Xcode and your Finder) but for the most part that's just the way things are in the MacOS app ecosystem. Open source, on the other hand, is like trying to shave with a razor blade with no handle. It's a hard sell to get people to donate to projects that they know are going to cut them at some point.
  - patrickthebold 8y ago
    A 'donate' button isn't a business model. Some open source projects have a business model built around paid support. By all means please donate to projects you want to support. But 'donation' implies you aren't getting something in return. Otherwise it would be a 'purchase'.
  - jrs95 8y ago
    Speaking of exceptions to this...they really need to fix their damn multi monitor support. It’s one of the few things Windows is far better at. I get that a small number of Mac users are even affected by this, but man would I appreciate that a lot more than Dark Mode. And I love Dark Mode.
    - xur17 8y ago
      What issues have you experienced with their multimonitor support?
      - jrs95 8y ago
        It takes a long time to wake from sleep, sometimes over 30 seconds with monitors flickering on and off. Which monitor displays which desktop will change after unplugging and plugging back in, or even after sleeping and waking back up.
- TimJYoung 8y ago
  Relying on the good will of others does not work, period. The fact that it works sometimes is not something that one can use as the reason to quit their job and start an "endeavor" (you can't really call it a business). Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay.
  - justinclift 8y ago
    > Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay. Things to appear to be changing for the better though. As an examply, Gina Häußge is working full time on OctoPrint (3D printing software) supported entirely by donations: https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel There are probably others too, I'm just not aware of them and have only really started looking at Patreon recently (for a project I'm involved with). :)
    - TimJYoung 8y ago
      Again, donations, etc. may work for some creators, but they will not work for all. There are always going to be products that are "Wow, I'm donating to her !", but the vast majority are more of the "plumbing" variety that are much, much harder to monetize in ways other than "pay me".
      - justinclift 8y ago
        Sure. But the original statement was that it does not work. eg 0% success Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)
        TimJYoung 8y ago
        Yes, but that statement was followed by more details as to exactly what I meant. A model that only works for a small percentage of people does not work. My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades. You want to know why the JS ecosystem keeps suffering from the "shiny penny" problem ? This is one of the reasons.
- derefr 8y ago
  The things that people choose to pay money for, in software, drive an incentive system that results in polished user experiences. The things that people choose to donate for, in software, drive an incentive system that results in ever-increasing code quality and security and a bunch of other things that developers themselves care about, and feel that users should care about, but which don't actually affect application polish very much. It's not even down to the companies choosing to do this or that with your money. It's a response to incentives. They know that, under a paid model, they'll keep getting money only if they do X; and under a donation model, they'll keep getting money if only they do Y. And so they prioritize X, or they prioritize Y, regardless of which one they think should be prioritized. If you want X from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of paid software businesses. If you want Y from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of donation-supported software organizations. If you want both... I'm not sure. Maybe support both ecosystems, and encourage the donation-driven organizations to put their work into "cores" or "engines" that can be wrapped into polished experiences by the paid companies?
- dizzystar 8y ago
  These are already supported by corporations. They pay millions vs your handful of dollars.
cup-of-tea 8y ago
What in the... You could donate to the FSF, OSI, or directly to the developers of most projects. Did you even bother looking?
- jackweirdy 8y ago
  A donation doesn’t reasonably entitle you to expect anything. A purchase does
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    Does it? In either case the code is already written. Your payment doesn't mean there will be new features.
- jcrben 8y ago
  If you donate, there's no guarantee that everyone else is donating. So you end up supporting the free riders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem). Which is a disincentive to donate.
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    That problem seems to me like it isn't telling a whole story. There have always been free riders of many kinds in society. But society isn't built around a single variable. People who get a free ride in some way often are supporting other free riders in other enterprises. Basically if you are strict about trying to eliminate all free riders, you're going to break society in a vain effort to maximize fairness in lieu of effectiveness. Society works because everyone assumes that even if some things are unfair, most will manage and the ups and downs will average out over time. In the example given on the wiki page, people who swoop in and take the last minutes left on a parking meter that someone else paid for but didn't stay long enough to use are supposedly able to break the system. But I think that trying to lock the system down tight and completely prevent that behavior could feasibly be more damaging to the health of the system than simply tolerating it as an occasional but mostly harmless exploit. There's a few studies which show that some piracy and other free usage might actually help an industry's profits. Key word is "some"--there is obviously a threshold past which would become very damaging. But nonetheless, if one can set aside their outrage over unfairness (which is very understandable for somebody who has poured their life and soul into working on an IP or paid a lot to license it legitimately) then one can probably stand to benefit even from the thieves and freeloaders if they manage it correctly. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-online-piracy-help-boost-sales.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-onlin...
jancsika 8y ago
> It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job. You miss the possibility of simply offering to pay a developer with the relevant expertise to fix one of these bugs for you. I can tell you from experience that there are FLOSS developers out there with sufficient expertise and professionalism to do this.
- afarrell 8y ago
  If I'm running an enterprise, perhaps then I can budget enough time and money to communicate about and pay for that and deal with the uncertainty inherent in software schedules. In my personal life...that sounds like a stressor that I'd be willing to pay money to avoid.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    Sure but this sounds like an opportunity for something like “Uber for FLOSS support.” Or perhaps it would be more like OkCupid. But you could pay money and your FLOSS problems get researched and solved for you by a developer who is experienced in this area. In practice I can see this as a forum where people make minimal effort posts and skilled people give them quality support. Just as I was forming the previous sentence I realize Stack Overflow and Reddit kind of do this. Maybe it would just be nice if people found a good way to add payment to the process. Anyway, it’s not as nice as not having the bugs in the first place, but FLOSS has other advantages. There will continue to be people who choose commercially supported software, but the more we can close the gap on quality with FLOSS the better.
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      The issue is that even if he managed to find a good developer to pay to improve some FLOSS software, it would come out very expensive in the end, first because the UI frameworks & libraries you get in the Linux world are nowhere near what you get on macOS, so the developer will require more time, and also because you won’t be selling that software later on to make any kind of money back since it’s FLOSS, and even when it’s proprietary and not FLOSS, the potential market for Linux software (let alone paid Linux software) is very small.
kazinator 8y ago
This is actually completely backwards in an ironic way. I have found in the past that when I made a program closed source, for sale, all further incentive to do anything to the program became connected to its revenue. Like, "it hasn't generated any meaningful revenue, so I cannot justify spending another N hours on it unless those hours lead to sales." Most software that you can buy has little or no revenue, which means you will be one of a scarce set of suckers paying for it. That meagre revenue doesn't pay for the developer resources to improve the program. Paying for software is like an insurance premium against bugs and issues in that program. Paying for some unpopular software with few users is like buying insurance from an insurance company that insures only a handful of other policy holders.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards provided hundreds of sources, tested and re-tested proof, and description of experiments proving over and over again that for humans, extrinsic rewards kill intrinsic motivation. If you want your child who loves drawing to stop loving it, reward them. If you want them to stop learning, tie a reward to their learning. It’s very simple, really. Being able to receive sustainable income for doing what you love doing, is a different formula though. Subtly, but different.
  - Bromskloss 8y ago
    > If you want your child who loves drawing to stop loving it, reward them. If you want them to stop learning, tie a reward to their learning. Is there a way to achieve the opposite? > Being able to receive sustainable income for doing what you love doing, is a different formula though. What is the difference?
    - andrei_says_ 8y ago
      To “achieve the opposite”: give up on your agenda for their relationship with drawing, or whatever interest of theirs you want to promote. Support it when requested, but give support only when requested. Think of your child as being driven by their enthusiasm and interest. They don’t control these forces and you do t either. Trying to force them kills them. Trying to direct them suffocates them. So, be there, celebrate what they celebrate, lend an year to their doubts, feel free to offer a bit of support but never insist on it. Watch it grow and maintain the soil; that’s all you can really do. Compliments are also rewards by the way ;) I highly recommend taking a look at the book, it’s in most libraries.
shmerl 8y ago
This logic is flawed. FOSS software doesn't need to equal software that no one pays for. You want to support FOSS development? There are tons of projects which take financial support, feel free to contribute. You can also support companies which directly work on developing FOSS.
willtim 8y ago
This only makes sense for software that you use frequently and don't mind repurchasing everytime Apple breaks them with OSX upgrades.

wazoox 8y ago

I use Linux and most free software projects allow donations. I even donated to projects I don't actually use, like FreeBSD. I donated money to many free software projects, Ardour, Mozilla, LibreOffice, OpenBSD, etc. This is clearly a false dichotomy.

pjmlp 8y ago
Try to pay for a mortgage with donations.
- wazoox 8y ago
  99% of paid apps developers can't make end meet anyway. Another false dichotomy. Creating an app and sticking a price on it isn't a business model any more than creating an app and asking for donations. Both are almost certain failure. But people constantly hear about this guy or that company that made some huge success and became rich; nobody talks about the millions who failed and whose apps were simply forgotten. Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations. So that definitely can pay the bills, but the same reasoning applies: it's only true for a small minority, and you can't count on it.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    > Oh, and BTW, the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace and many other NGOs live, AFAIK, mostly on donations. They do, but they also get sponsoring from many governments across the globe, do continuous street actions trying to get people to donate for them´, and after a certain age most people end up leaving to some positions with more stability.
ropeadopepope 8y ago
The problem with open source is, for some reason, the developers feel no sense of obligation to the end users or the people who donate to them. MacOS devs do and will go out of their way to make sure their software is not just usable, but a sheer pleasure to use in every way possible. Yes, there are exceptions (I'm looking at you, Apple, with your Xcode and your Finder) but for the most part that's just the way things are in the MacOS app ecosystem. Open source, on the other hand, is like trying to shave with a razor blade with no handle. It's a hard sell to get people to donate to projects that they know are going to cut them at some point.
- patrickthebold 8y ago
  A 'donate' button isn't a business model. Some open source projects have a business model built around paid support. By all means please donate to projects you want to support. But 'donation' implies you aren't getting something in return. Otherwise it would be a 'purchase'.
- jrs95 8y ago
  Speaking of exceptions to this...they really need to fix their damn multi monitor support. It’s one of the few things Windows is far better at. I get that a small number of Mac users are even affected by this, but man would I appreciate that a lot more than Dark Mode. And I love Dark Mode.
  - xur17 8y ago
    What issues have you experienced with their multimonitor support?
    - jrs95 8y ago
      It takes a long time to wake from sleep, sometimes over 30 seconds with monitors flickering on and off. Which monitor displays which desktop will change after unplugging and plugging back in, or even after sleeping and waking back up.
TimJYoung 8y ago
Relying on the good will of others does not work, period. The fact that it works sometimes is not something that one can use as the reason to quit their job and start an "endeavor" (you can't really call it a business). Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay.
- justinclift 8y ago
  > Can we please dispense with this notion and start realizing one simple fact: people will typically only pay for something if you make them pay. Things to appear to be changing for the better though. As an examply, Gina Häußge is working full time on OctoPrint (3D printing software) supported entirely by donations: https://www.patreon.com/foosel https://www.patreon.com/foosel There are probably others too, I'm just not aware of them and have only really started looking at Patreon recently (for a project I'm involved with). :)
  - TimJYoung 8y ago
    Again, donations, etc. may work for some creators, but they will not work for all. There are always going to be products that are "Wow, I'm donating to her !", but the vast majority are more of the "plumbing" variety that are much, much harder to monetize in ways other than "pay me".
    - justinclift 8y ago
      Sure. But the original statement was that it does not work. eg 0% success Whereas clearly it can, as there are the occasional success stories. So, it's more than 0%. Maybe not a high percentage yet though. ;)
      - TimJYoung 8y ago
        Yes, but that statement was followed by more details as to exactly what I meant. A model that only works for a small percentage of people does not work. My point is that you can't start a business based upon some vague hope that someday, somehow, someone will possibly choose to donate money to you. You need a reliable stream of income, and one that will keep coming long after the shine has worn off the original product and now you're slogging through complicated maintenance and upgrades. You want to know why the JS ecosystem keeps suffering from the "shiny penny" problem ? This is one of the reasons.
derefr 8y ago
The things that people choose to pay money for, in software, drive an incentive system that results in polished user experiences. The things that people choose to donate for, in software, drive an incentive system that results in ever-increasing code quality and security and a bunch of other things that developers themselves care about, and feel that users should care about, but which don't actually affect application polish very much. It's not even down to the companies choosing to do this or that with your money. It's a response to incentives. They know that, under a paid model, they'll keep getting money only if they do X; and under a donation model, they'll keep getting money if only they do Y. And so they prioritize X, or they prioritize Y, regardless of which one they think should be prioritized. If you want X from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of paid software businesses. If you want Y from your software, you should advocate for an ecosystem of donation-supported software organizations. If you want both... I'm not sure. Maybe support both ecosystems, and encourage the donation-driven organizations to put their work into "cores" or "engines" that can be wrapped into polished experiences by the paid companies?
dizzystar 8y ago
These are already supported by corporations. They pay millions vs your handful of dollars.

cup-of-tea 8y ago

What in the... You could donate to the FSF, OSI, or directly to the developers of most projects. Did you even bother looking?

jackweirdy 8y ago
A donation doesn’t reasonably entitle you to expect anything. A purchase does
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  Does it? In either case the code is already written. Your payment doesn't mean there will be new features.
jcrben 8y ago
If you donate, there's no guarantee that everyone else is donating. So you end up supporting the free riders (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem). Which is a disincentive to donate.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  That problem seems to me like it isn't telling a whole story. There have always been free riders of many kinds in society. But society isn't built around a single variable. People who get a free ride in some way often are supporting other free riders in other enterprises. Basically if you are strict about trying to eliminate all free riders, you're going to break society in a vain effort to maximize fairness in lieu of effectiveness. Society works because everyone assumes that even if some things are unfair, most will manage and the ups and downs will average out over time. In the example given on the wiki page, people who swoop in and take the last minutes left on a parking meter that someone else paid for but didn't stay long enough to use are supposedly able to break the system. But I think that trying to lock the system down tight and completely prevent that behavior could feasibly be more damaging to the health of the system than simply tolerating it as an occasional but mostly harmless exploit. There's a few studies which show that some piracy and other free usage might actually help an industry's profits. Key word is "some"--there is obviously a threshold past which would become very damaging. But nonetheless, if one can set aside their outrage over unfairness (which is very understandable for somebody who has poured their life and soul into working on an IP or paid a lot to license it legitimately) then one can probably stand to benefit even from the thieves and freeloaders if they manage it correctly. https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-online-piracy-help-boost-sales.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/06/13/does-onlin...

jancsika 8y ago

> It is waaaay more efficient for these to be fixed by an engineer working not in their spare time, but as their full-time job. You miss the possibility of simply offering to pay a developer with the relevant expertise to fix one of these bugs for you. I can tell you from experience that there are FLOSS developers out there with sufficient expertise and professionalism to do this.

afarrell 8y ago
If I'm running an enterprise, perhaps then I can budget enough time and money to communicate about and pay for that and deal with the uncertainty inherent in software schedules. In my personal life...that sounds like a stressor that I'd be willing to pay money to avoid.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Sure but this sounds like an opportunity for something like “Uber for FLOSS support.” Or perhaps it would be more like OkCupid. But you could pay money and your FLOSS problems get researched and solved for you by a developer who is experienced in this area. In practice I can see this as a forum where people make minimal effort posts and skilled people give them quality support. Just as I was forming the previous sentence I realize Stack Overflow and Reddit kind of do this. Maybe it would just be nice if people found a good way to add payment to the process. Anyway, it’s not as nice as not having the bugs in the first place, but FLOSS has other advantages. There will continue to be people who choose commercially supported software, but the more we can close the gap on quality with FLOSS the better.
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    The issue is that even if he managed to find a good developer to pay to improve some FLOSS software, it would come out very expensive in the end, first because the UI frameworks & libraries you get in the Linux world are nowhere near what you get on macOS, so the developer will require more time, and also because you won’t be selling that software later on to make any kind of money back since it’s FLOSS, and even when it’s proprietary and not FLOSS, the potential market for Linux software (let alone paid Linux software) is very small.

kazinator 8y ago

This is actually completely backwards in an ironic way. I have found in the past that when I made a program closed source, for sale, all further incentive to do anything to the program became connected to its revenue. Like, "it hasn't generated any meaningful revenue, so I cannot justify spending another N hours on it unless those hours lead to sales." Most software that you can buy has little or no revenue, which means you will be one of a scarce set of suckers paying for it. That meagre revenue doesn't pay for the developer resources to improve the program. Paying for software is like an insurance premium against bugs and issues in that program. Paying for some unpopular software with few users is like buying insurance from an insurance company that insures only a handful of other policy holders.

andrei_says_ 8y ago
Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards provided hundreds of sources, tested and re-tested proof, and description of experiments proving over and over again that for humans, extrinsic rewards kill intrinsic motivation. If you want your child who loves drawing to stop loving it, reward them. If you want them to stop learning, tie a reward to their learning. It’s very simple, really. Being able to receive sustainable income for doing what you love doing, is a different formula though. Subtly, but different.
- Bromskloss 8y ago
  > If you want your child who loves drawing to stop loving it, reward them. If you want them to stop learning, tie a reward to their learning. Is there a way to achieve the opposite? > Being able to receive sustainable income for doing what you love doing, is a different formula though. What is the difference?
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago
    To “achieve the opposite”: give up on your agenda for their relationship with drawing, or whatever interest of theirs you want to promote. Support it when requested, but give support only when requested. Think of your child as being driven by their enthusiasm and interest. They don’t control these forces and you do t either. Trying to force them kills them. Trying to direct them suffocates them. So, be there, celebrate what they celebrate, lend an year to their doubts, feel free to offer a bit of support but never insist on it. Watch it grow and maintain the soil; that’s all you can really do. Compliments are also rewards by the way ;) I highly recommend taking a look at the book, it’s in most libraries.

shmerl 8y ago

This logic is flawed. FOSS software doesn't need to equal software that no one pays for. You want to support FOSS development? There are tons of projects which take financial support, feel free to contribute. You can also support companies which directly work on developing FOSS.

willtim 8y ago

This only makes sense for software that you use frequently and don't mind repurchasing everytime Apple breaks them with OSX upgrades.