and charge for if you wish
- the GPL
I would totally pay for the currently free thing if you made me. Just not the amount you just thought about.
- Arusekk
You don't need to make it free. You just need to make it cheap enough.
- free market absolutists
OH SHOOT is this unionization by OSS developers WE ARE SO TOAST
- 'agentic' coding businesses
לֹא־תָלִין פְּעֻלַּת שָׂכִיר אִתְּךָ עַד־בֹּקֶר
- Leviticus 19:13b
The eternal open source funding problem: FLOSS devs are providing value and getting none of it. Why? Because they don't have money to pay each other. They don't even have money to pay for online services. Yet they pay for domain names, Internet access, electricity, not to mention food or rent. That's why they stick to free and cheap services. Then big tech comes for everything that keeps being free, precisely because it keeps being free. Then the services feel the cost. Then they stop being so free, because everyone costs them actual money.* Hotlink protection only ever was a half measure.
*Like Docker Hub. Have they ever heard of BitTorrent??
We too feel the cost of living, yet we provide to others what we feel is worth more than simply paying their cost of living. But then they don't provide to us. What a shame.
Your software is great but it won't pay my bills. I need your software and your money, but I will give you my software and my money.
We despise twisted business models and unsubstantiated charges. How about a clean business model and substantiated charges?
Remember kids selling newspapers?* Starting from a single sale, with 50% markup and exponential growth, they were able to start stands reselling newspapers weeks in. They did not sell newspapers they got for free (except the first ones). They paid the fair price for them. Selling to the kids was great too, they took away overstocking risk, and you could go home early.*
I am the kid now, but I distribute software. You get the same from me as from others. But by paying me you fund the makers. By getting it directly from them, you cause them costs.
*I imagine so - I am too young to have ever sold newspapers.
Transfering a single TB of data around the world costs like 5€. Storing it for a year also costs like 5€. It might seem peanuts, but a single banana is even cheaper. Yet you pay your hard earned money for it, don't you? You are not a banana thief, are you?
You can certainly pay this much from the marketing budget, once. Or twice. But not a gazillion times.
Why have we moved away from the proven old model of costs + markup?
Royalties? Restrictions? Exclusive deals? Open core? Freemium? None of it here.
Free zines serve the publisher (ads or agenda; some have good ads the readers want to discover anyway).
Paid zines can serve the reader and need no ads. They need to be wanted.*
*or legally mandated, vide Elsevier
Copyleft Market is only subsidizing a single server. All the rest is funded by you or by hosting providers.
Everything actually paid for our services, exceeding our costs, save some fees and minor markup, goes straight to the developer. The developers then fund the projects they use through downloads or direct donations.
Directly donating goes directly to the target service, no cuts.
Want your content to be free of charge? You can set the budget, but then you need to pay the bills. Want to earn in other ways? Advertise, sell binaries, sell warranties, sell support. But then pay up. Negotiate wholesale discounts, but never below the costs.
Think of the newspaper stand.
You can take a look for free.
But you cannot take a newspaper without paying.
You might be allowed to read all of the newspaper by the stand.
But you sure cannot just come to the stand with a fax machine and start scanning all the pages WITHOUT PAYING A DIME
as I watch you do it.
All while being masked so I cannot even recognize you the next time you come.
You can maybe take one the first time I see you if you show me your face or something.
Each new account gets a free credit in exchange for giving away a personal detail, but once it dries up - you need to pay, sorry. No need for doxxing if you do pay. I might consider various anonymous payment schemes, including TALER. Otherwise, you need to prove an established online identity, like linking from a pretty active Fediverse account, personal blog, or whatever. Or calling me from your personal phone number during business hours. And then waiting a few days while I get to know your online legacy. Or avoiding all that circus and just paying upfront.
I understand that not everyone can afford my service. That's fine. Go somewhere else. Or, explain your situation to me over a support email, I tend to be empathetic despite all my greed.
Pay per-MB(!) of traffic and storage-years, and per-second(!) of CI/CD. Earn per-MB of traffic. Choose the price yourself. Any price. Any nonzero IEEE754 double. The Invisible Hand does the rest. For malicious compliance, free unreliable ultra-slow downloads from the subsidized server get auto-enabled if AGPLv3/GPLv3 is detected. GPL3 was published mid-2007 in the US, and I can guesstimate 371 kbps was the median residential upload speed there. Using all upload bandwidth in 2007 would be very generous. Try to be thankful. The FSF did a bad job this one time in my opinion, but whatever. If the crystal (my server) breaks, try polishing it with a gentler hammer.
Q: Why? Seriously, why pay for something free? Why paywall?
A: It's not actually free if you squint. It's just paid for by someone else. Paywall? Paywalls work just fine, media outlets with them still do great.
Q: Is looks like it will attract money laundering via stolen credentials.
A: Valid point. Delaying payouts of anomalous magnitude should solve that. Since this is NOT a blockchain, I can do dispute resolution and then undo any transactions I please.
Q: Is this some kind of Ponzi scheme?
A: No, normal business. You get your value from me, cover my variable costs and pay a markup that covers my constant costs and my profit.
Q: What? Are you out of your mind.
A: No! And by the way, why is my mental health any of your business?
Q: Capitalism is the problem!
A: I believe there are two separate problems. The first one is online payment processing fees. They make small payments plain impossible. The smallest I could find were like 5€ + 0.9% or 0.10€ + 10%. Look, payment providers know to care about their bottom line, otherwise they would go bankrupt overnight. Why should you not care? The second one is restricting competition. Mostly copyright, but also trademarks, patents, and SLAPPs alike. I am myself not restricting my competition even though current laws by WIPO encourage me to. I am only subverting their monopoly-enshrining rules to make my downstream's downstreams as useful to everyone as I am.
Q: So you want to be competed with?
A: YES! Thank you! Please do compete with me! The first to get $1k ARR gives the others a lifetime discount. (Note: discount, not infinite credit! Anyway, you don't have to.)
Q: You are out of your mind. You need moots! No entrepreneur would say that!
A: Every entrepreneur would say that, except for those control-freak MBA grads. I am perfectly sane. I just want such a business to exist, regardless of whether mine brings the most profit. There is none currently, and I want there to be some. I am just sick and tired of this entitled free-lunch culture. Back in the day, if you got tons of useless paper spam, you could at least use it to fuel the stove. Now all you get is entropy choking your link.
Q: Why don't Wikipedia and Internet Archive do it?
A: I wonder too. I hope that in case their funding is jeopardized, they would adopt this model instead of just going away.
A: That's not really a question, but let me answer it. Yes I am a greedy capitalist and I am furthering my agenda to get as rich as possible, so that I can finally fund things I care about. However, copyleft is the exact opposite of gatekeeping, you can ask anyone with a copy to give you one, even if I decide to ban you forever (which I am not, because - save DDoS - you pay me more than you cost me). Most of the projects hosted here are also hosted elsewhere. Also note that by no means am I a billionaire. I wonder if I even have 5 digits of net worth actually.
Q: What is your position on NLP-generated source code?
A: Have you even read the GPL? 'Source' means 'the preferred form for making modifications in'. NLP-generated 'source' code is not source code. The prompt history is the source code, and the pre-NLP (seed) code is source code, and the remote resources accessed by the pipeline are the source code, in case your NLP machine did browse the web. The NLP tooling is the (however unreliable, inefficient, resource-intensive, proprietary for the most part) compiler, or a full build system. The generated code is merely object code. I am myself not suing anyone (yet) to reveal the source code. But you do you. You'd better keep a log of the prompt history.
*Hi @hsza (and others)! I get where you are coming from, but I disagree. I hope you will too one day enjoy the fruit of what I am sowing.
Sorry to disappoint you. I'm just starting. Under construction.
Discuss on the Orange Site (news ycombinator thing), or the Red Site (lobsters). Or on fediverse (ping me then).
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