5 ms·

From the perspective of user, it's not as simple, at least for some. a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting.

by nske 6y ago

From the perspective of user, it's not as simple, at least for some. a) At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well? Personally I admit that I rarely donate to free projects as an individual, unless they explicitly ask for a fixed amount that I find reasonable, because I dread the process of such decisions. 2) At a business level, usually there is a complete detachment between the value drawn out of a piece of a free software and the process of donations. The company is there to maximize its profits and minimize its costs, donations exist at a separate sphere that has more to do with financial/tax or PR incentives than the intrinsic value of the free software project, so all donations tend to get send to recognized charity organizations. Very often the people who understand the value that a piece of free software brings to the business, have the right mindset and want to donate, but there is no process to make it easy for them to do so (it would be awkward to put a purchase order to the finance department for a donation). For that reason, I would encourage every free software project that cares about funding to sell something at a fixed price, that can pass for a standard purchase in the eyes of a non-technical person -i.e. call it support/maintenance plan, or premium forum access. Even if in reality it adds nothing to the value of the software, it makes it easy for IT departments to support projects they are using that they would otherwise not be able to. Speaking from experience, it's very frustrating to see how much a company spends for bullshit and not be able to donate even a small amount to projects that bring much higher value to the company.

phone8675309 6y ago
>At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? I can't speak for what society should do, but I adopt a "value for value" mindset. If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. This is sometimes hard to quantify, but as a rough estimate, if it's in a professional capacity, I start my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me, and if it's in a personal capacity (think used with hobby work), I start with half my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me. You should never feel like you should give more than you can comfortably give. > Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? It depends on the project - often I'll ask the author. Some software is backed with recurring donators, so a one-time donation to help pay for some hardware or software the project needs is the most helpful, but some software is not backed by recurring donations, so a smaller, recurring donation will help sustain the project for longer (especially with hosting bills or other recurring expenses). My number one suggestion to free software authors that accept donations would be to specify whether one-time or recurring donations would be more helpful, and if one-time, if there are specific expenses/amounts that are needed that could have a high impact on the project. > Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well? Disabuse yourself of the notion that life is fair. For me, there is certain free software that I use almost constantly (Debian and Emacs, say), and some free software that I use one-off that saves me a large amount of time. Both are examples of projects that I would consider donate to. Something that I use once or twice a month for a short amount of time and has many alternatives I may not donate to.
- ohthehugemanate 6y ago
  > If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix? The bulk of OSS is invisible "plumbing" that provides the critical infrastructure for the software we actually use on a day to day basis (proprietary and OSS). I'm happy to hear that you contribute to some projects and that's great, but you haven't exactly solved the tragedy of the commons.
  - phone8675309 6y ago
    >Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix? Sure! For regular one-time donations: - Debian => $500 once a year (typically in the summer) - Free Software Foundation => $500 once a year (typically around the new year) - MetaARPA membership on the SDF => $36 once a year (in August) For regular ongoing donations: - $60/half year to the OpenBSD Foundation for OpenBSD (once for each release - I used to buy each CD set but they don't sell them anymore) - $20/month to the OpenBSD Foundation to support OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPd - $5/month to a niche forum that I post to on occasion - $5/month to a podcast that I listen to - $6/month to a BandCamp artist that I listen to For other projects, I'll keep an eye on their calls for donation for specific things and support them one-off as I can. GnuCash says I've donated about $5000 over the last ten years or so doing that.
danShumway 6y ago
I think your business analysis is completely on-point. On the other hand: > At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. I don't think I disagree with you, but couldn't you argue the same exact thing about paid software? "At a personal level, paid software forces the user to make choices upfront about whether or not the software is valuable enough to justify the cost; often before they have enough experience with the software to know how valuable it will be. If the software will be useful for 5 months but doesn't come with free upgrades, does that change the value proposition? Should they wait and watch some tutorial videos before paying for the software? Should they comparison shop with other brands? Should they wait to see if a sale is incoming, or if a new version is about to be released? If there's a free trial or demo version, should they just use that instead of purchasing?" "Personally, I rarely purchase software as an individual, because I dread the process of such decisions." ---- Again, I don't think I disagree with the main thrust of having a purchasing option somewhere for something. But where choice is concerned it's worth noting that consumers have to make choices regardless of which path you go down. It's just that they're used to some choices more than others. It might not be unreasonable to imagine that in a generation or two, people might get more used to the choices they have to make surrounding donations.
- nske 6y ago
  Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, based on the best information that I have about it, or not and I don't. Depending on the asking price, I will spend some time to research, in order to minimise my chances of being disappointed, but that's straightforward enough. Whereas when I'm faced with a donation button that leads to an empty box waiting to be filled, or even to a number of presets, my mind goes in too many directions: "Is this particular project more worthy of donations than dozens of other free software projects I am using every day? What am I using every day, let me think, Linux, FreeBSD, Xorg, GNU, vim -jesus that'll be a long list, I can't donate to all of them. Well maybe I could just give a few quid to all, but donating a few quid to some of these projects would be a joke -the big ones receive a lot of funding regardless. And it would be too much effort just to find the details on how to donate anyway." So now I have to factor in not just how much value I would attribute to each project which is hard enough as it is, but also how much difference it could make -how much the project is in need of funding. It just feels too arbitrary and exhausting to deal with all this, so in the end I don't bother. Obviously some people don't overanalyse things and just act spontaneously -sometimes I do too, but rarely. I don't think I'm the only one that has this mental block. On the other hand if a project says "you like this project? If so, please click here to donate $x" -then that's awesome, I like the software, it's asking for $x, $x is a reasonable amount, so I just do it and move on. Or I don't, if I don't think $x is reasonable (I don't think that's happened, normally free software authors are very modest in what they're asking when they do that). Giving me a single choice taps to the spontaneous part of me, asking me to pick an amount myself triggers my analysing part. The ideal for me would be if there was a platform that asks you to put a total amount you're willing to spend every month, then asks you to select the projects you're using and a rating of how much you appreciate each, then it factors that along with some objective development activity measures to distribute the amount between the projects, perhaps with an increased weight to smaller projects. I think someone actually posted a similar idea here recently.

by nske 6y ago

phone8675309 6y ago

>At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. Should I donate $1, $10, or $100? Should I donate based on my perception of how much each project lacks funds, based on how much value I extract out of the software -which is not easy to quantify anyway- or just send an amount that I wouldn't miss? I can't speak for what society should do, but I adopt a "value for value" mindset. If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. This is sometimes hard to quantify, but as a rough estimate, if it's in a professional capacity, I start my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me, and if it's in a personal capacity (think used with hobby work), I start with half my hourly rate multiplied by the time it saved me. You should never feel like you should give more than you can comfortably give. > Should I donate one-time and forget about it or set a recurring donation? If recurring, shouldn't I monitor the project's development to decide if a recurring donation should continue? It depends on the project - often I'll ask the author. Some software is backed with recurring donators, so a one-time donation to help pay for some hardware or software the project needs is the most helpful, but some software is not backed by recurring donations, so a smaller, recurring donation will help sustain the project for longer (especially with hosting bills or other recurring expenses). My number one suggestion to free software authors that accept donations would be to specify whether one-time or recurring donations would be more helpful, and if one-time, if there are specific expenses/amounts that are needed that could have a high impact on the project. > Then would it not be fair to hunt down every single free software project I'm using and evaluate its needs and value in order to donate to that as well? Disabuse yourself of the notion that life is fair. For me, there is certain free software that I use almost constantly (Debian and Emacs, say), and some free software that I use one-off that saves me a large amount of time. Both are examples of projects that I would consider donate to. Something that I use once or twice a month for a short amount of time and has many alternatives I may not donate to.

ohthehugemanate 6y ago
> If software saves me time, I drop a donation that is in proportion to the value it has to me. Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix? The bulk of OSS is invisible "plumbing" that provides the critical infrastructure for the software we actually use on a day to day basis (proprietary and OSS). I'm happy to hear that you contribute to some projects and that's great, but you haven't exactly solved the tragedy of the commons.
- phone8675309 6y ago
  >Love this idea. Can you give some example amounts? How much have you donated to OpenSSL? NTP? Postfix? Sure! For regular one-time donations: - Debian => $500 once a year (typically in the summer) - Free Software Foundation => $500 once a year (typically around the new year) - MetaARPA membership on the SDF => $36 once a year (in August) For regular ongoing donations: - $60/half year to the OpenBSD Foundation for OpenBSD (once for each release - I used to buy each CD set but they don't sell them anymore) - $20/month to the OpenBSD Foundation to support OpenSSH, LibreSSL, and OpenNTPd - $5/month to a niche forum that I post to on occasion - $5/month to a podcast that I listen to - $6/month to a BandCamp artist that I listen to For other projects, I'll keep an eye on their calls for donation for specific things and support them one-off as I can. GnuCash says I've donated about $5000 over the last ten years or so doing that.

danShumway 6y ago

I think your business analysis is completely on-point. On the other hand: > At a personal level, it forces the user to make choices. Making choices is exhausting. I don't think I disagree with you, but couldn't you argue the same exact thing about paid software? "At a personal level, paid software forces the user to make choices upfront about whether or not the software is valuable enough to justify the cost; often before they have enough experience with the software to know how valuable it will be. If the software will be useful for 5 months but doesn't come with free upgrades, does that change the value proposition? Should they wait and watch some tutorial videos before paying for the software? Should they comparison shop with other brands? Should they wait to see if a sale is incoming, or if a new version is about to be released? If there's a free trial or demo version, should they just use that instead of purchasing?" "Personally, I rarely purchase software as an individual, because I dread the process of such decisions." ---- Again, I don't think I disagree with the main thrust of having a purchasing option somewhere for something. But where choice is concerned it's worth noting that consumers have to make choices regardless of which path you go down. It's just that they're used to some choices more than others. It might not be unreasonable to imagine that in a generation or two, people might get more used to the choices they have to make surrounding donations.

nske 6y ago
Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, based on the best information that I have about it, or not and I don't. Depending on the asking price, I will spend some time to research, in order to minimise my chances of being disappointed, but that's straightforward enough. Whereas when I'm faced with a donation button that leads to an empty box waiting to be filled, or even to a number of presets, my mind goes in too many directions: "Is this particular project more worthy of donations than dozens of other free software projects I am using every day? What am I using every day, let me think, Linux, FreeBSD, Xorg, GNU, vim -jesus that'll be a long list, I can't donate to all of them. Well maybe I could just give a few quid to all, but donating a few quid to some of these projects would be a joke -the big ones receive a lot of funding regardless. And it would be too much effort just to find the details on how to donate anyway." So now I have to factor in not just how much value I would attribute to each project which is hard enough as it is, but also how much difference it could make -how much the project is in need of funding. It just feels too arbitrary and exhausting to deal with all this, so in the end I don't bother. Obviously some people don't overanalyse things and just act spontaneously -sometimes I do too, but rarely. I don't think I'm the only one that has this mental block. On the other hand if a project says "you like this project? If so, please click here to donate $x" -then that's awesome, I like the software, it's asking for $x, $x is a reasonable amount, so I just do it and move on. Or I don't, if I don't think $x is reasonable (I don't think that's happened, normally free software authors are very modest in what they're asking when they do that). Giving me a single choice taps to the spontaneous part of me, asking me to pick an amount myself triggers my analysing part. The ideal for me would be if there was a platform that asks you to put a total amount you're willing to spend every month, then asks you to select the projects you're using and a rating of how much you appreciate each, then it factors that along with some objective development activity measures to distribute the amount between the projects, perhaps with an increased weight to smaller projects. I think someone actually posted a similar idea here recently.