Consider, though, the value you received in non-monetary terms. How much would you have had to pay?

Yea this phrasing sounds a lot better

Yup, I'm the same way. If I could work in FOSS, I'd be happy to take a pay cut, but FOSS doesn't pay anywhere near good enough. So it'll remain a hobby.

As such, I'm pretty reasonable about what needs to be open source, and what's fine being proprietary. For example:

• OS - must be FOSS
• games - proprietary is fine, but no privileged access (e.g. kernel level anti-cheat)
• web browser - must be FOSS
• web services - proprietary is fine, provided they don't collect a creepy amount of info about me

Basically, the more risk there is of a security issue, the more I expect it to be FOSS. And I'm willing to help out too. I've submitted patches to Lemmy and other FOSS projects I use, and I'll donate something similar to what I'd pay for a proprietary app for certain projects.

It"s a difficult viewpoint given where money flows. A better method shoupd be more government funded software, with a FOSS requirement since it's tax dollars.

That being said, I'm very fortunate to be working for a company that releases software under MIT and/or SSPLv1, and we use almost exclusively Open Source for our infrastructure and back office (decisions I made, but had the strong, proactive backing of our CEO/Founders).

You can build a business model on selling it, but you can't stop someone else doing the same.

Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.

The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.

In some "ecosystems" everything being free is kinda how you are compensated, instead of money. You spend time making your thing for free, but so does everyone else so you don't have to pay for those things either. The two main examples I've personally been involved with are game modding and 3d printing models, I use the free stuff other people make all the time, releasing the things I make for free is how I pay it back.

But yeah, if you use something you really like, throw them a buck or two for the work.
...although I've donated about as much as I've received as donations myself. Eh. No matter.

Aren't "consume" and "support" different concepts? The article is trash, so I'm not referring to that, but I could take this stance in broader terms.

• My voluntary time and money is limited, so if you keep your work proprietary, I'm not going to provide it to you any more than I absolutely need to in a basic, transactional sense.

If my boss says work on this project -I'll do it because I'm paid to do that, for the amount of time I'm paid to do it, but no more. If my bank says use this closed source application, okay fine, but I'll never recommend it to anyone or submit a bug report when it breaks. If my government or library is considering entering into some closed source ecosystem, I'll go out of my way to recommend against it, but I'll probably end up having to use it. If I feel like paying for Netflix, I'll share passwords and use regional VPNs, cancel whenever I feel like it, or whatever and never feel guilty.

If your product is open source, pretty much the opposite of all of the above. That's what I would consider as "support."

When I make this choice, I also change my expectations. The amount of money that is sloshing around in silicon valley is grotesque, and so of course they can throw whole towns worth of developers at just about any problem. The fit and finish of proprietary software is actually pretty bad considering the resources they have access to.

With FOSS software, a small project might be one or a few developers. But can it be good enough. I generally thing a lot of software has been good enough for a long time. A lot of computer applications are basically solved problems -text editing, search and reading, spreadsheets, forums, live chat, asynchronous mail, etc.

A proportion of FOSS users dropping a little money here and there will never give projects the kind of infinite growth expected in silicon valley, but it absolutely can fund small shops doing good, simple projects. Heck, it might even be more sustainable than the venture-capital-sell cycles that require every company to be perpetually exhibiting exponential growth or die. Yes, I'm aware that the bigger FOSS projects are only solvent because they make money from corporate customers. It is an issue that corporations seem to have nearly all the discretionary spending power, but thats for another discussion.

No, they don't say they will sue (they flat out can't), but they say they will cut off your access to any updates.

Now one could (and I would) argue that sounds like a restriction on exercising your open source rights. However the counter argument seems to be those protections apply only to software acquired to date, and if you deny access to future binaries you can deny access to those sources.

In any event, all this subtlety around the licensing aside, it's just a bigger hassle to use RedHat versus pretty much any other distribution, precisely because they kind of want IBM/Oracle style entitlement management where the user gets to have to do all the management work to look after their suppliers business needs.