Comment by dessant
2 years ago
> Exactly what kind of funding does it need?
I assume your time also has value. Open source software does not have to be shared free of charge, especially not when you need to invest your time and money to package and distribute the software and offer support for the project. The kind of puritan definition of open source that you're alluding to is only playing into the hands of the megacorps that are exploiting their users.
People deserve to be compensated for their work, especially when their work finds an active audience, even if they maintain an open source project.
So again, how many man-hours does it take, monthly, to maintain those apps? Note that I’m a programmer myself and so I’m not asking about the usual enterprise-level fake numbers.
Also, while open source definitely needs some funding, it can become badly harmed by too much of it, when code becomes developed purely for money and not for the usual ESR’s open source incentives.
Maybe it's not your intention, but from your comments it comes across like you're putting very little value on other people's work. It was probably a substantial effort that took years to bring these projects to the usability and popularity that they achieved. Again, i'm not sure why did the user above find it problematic to have a paid version of the app on Google Play, and the same version with the same features distributed for free on F-Droid.
Oh, I'm sure writing those apps was an effort. But I was asking about something quite different - the cost of maintaining them. You do need time or money or people to keep an Open Source project alive; but you don't need to pay the authors for the work they've done previously.
As for the problem with a paid version - it's because when it happens, shortly afterwards the free version starts to rot. Monetisation might be good for the owner, but it's almost always terrible to user experience.
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