this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
501 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
59361 readers
4904 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Back in the olden days, there used to be a variety of free software called postcard-ware. It was free to distribute and use, but if you wanted to you could send the author a postcard.
I think the reason so many new software projects have authors asking for donations is the barrier to writing software is now incredibly low. In the 90s you’d have to have a pretty nice PC, a good dial up plan, and writing software was much more of a hobby unless you were a pro. Nowadays internet access is ubiquitous, and with the tooling and wealth of resources available anyone can write good open source software. Often those people legitimately could use a donation to help fund their free time work. That and the open source projects that are just used as dependencies for corporate projects are all too common. I absolutely blame the system where people need more money to get by rather than thinking open source software devs are more greedy nowadays
lol ok maybe not anyone