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I'm bothered by this because Vim is free, with only a hopeful plea for a donation to a charity for helping Uganda as the "payment." It feels a tad unethical to

I'm bothered by this because Vim is free, with only a hopeful plea for a donation to a charity for helping Uganda as the "payment." It feels a tad unethical to be charging for a slightly more fancy, maybe kinda gamified, vimtutor. Like, just make a vim plugin that does this in vim and let that be your community donation. But I suppose business is business eh.

umvi 6y ago
I'm not bothered by it. I've thought about making a SaaS where I basically just host pre-compiled FOSS packages for esoteric cpu architectures. So that way if you have a <insert random CPU> embedded linux system, you can quickly grab a precompiled `tshark` for example without figuring out how to build it yourself. Sure, it would be better as a free service, but I'm not super motivated to do that in my highly limited spare time. I would be super motivated if I were compensated for my effort with cash, however. Making something paid vs. free can be the difference between it existing and not existing. I'd rather have this exist and be a paid app than not exist and be free.
ivanhoe 6y ago
yeah, but again nothing stops you (or me, or anyone else reading this) to do it for free... except we will not, as we're busy earning money in other ways, so I don't think any of us can really claim a moral high ground here - and tutoring people for money is certainly much better than not tutoring them at all...
thotsBgone 6y ago
It's not "unethical" to charge money for a product that you made from scratch. People on this website really like that word, "unethical". Makes me wonder if they even know what it means. "Unethical: something you don't like."?
CoffeePython 6y ago
I don’t agree with the viewpoint but the revenue here has helped me sponsor one of my favorite open source projects FastAPI at $250/mo. There’s value in providing teaching on something that is free. I’ve bought learning tools/apps for many different programming related topics and loved the value they provided.

umvi 6y ago

I'm not bothered by it. I've thought about making a SaaS where I basically just host pre-compiled FOSS packages for esoteric cpu architectures. So that way if you have a <insert random CPU> embedded linux system, you can quickly grab a precompiled `tshark` for example without figuring out how to build it yourself. Sure, it would be better as a free service, but I'm not super motivated to do that in my highly limited spare time. I would be super motivated if I were compensated for my effort with cash, however. Making something paid vs. free can be the difference between it existing and not existing. I'd rather have this exist and be a paid app than not exist and be free.

ivanhoe 6y ago

yeah, but again nothing stops you (or me, or anyone else reading this) to do it for free... except we will not, as we're busy earning money in other ways, so I don't think any of us can really claim a moral high ground here - and tutoring people for money is certainly much better than not tutoring them at all...

thotsBgone 6y ago

It's not "unethical" to charge money for a product that you made from scratch. People on this website really like that word, "unethical". Makes me wonder if they even know what it means. "Unethical: something you don't like."?

CoffeePython 6y ago

I don’t agree with the viewpoint but the revenue here has helped me sponsor one of my favorite open source projects FastAPI at $250/mo. There’s value in providing teaching on something that is free. I’ve bought learning tools/apps for many different programming related topics and loved the value they provided.