Getting paid for your work isn’t necessarily antithetical to developing free software. Free means free as in cost and freedom for the end user, not as in free of compensation to the developer(s).
For example, Blender is free software, yet the Blender foundation’s Development Fund brings in about a quarter million dollars monthly in donations to fund the actual development of the project.
I will say though, I certainly don’t agree with the original point that “the only ‘nice indie software’ is free software.” There are great indie projects that you can pay for, that still aren’t exploitative, just as there are indie and corporate projects that are exploitative. I just think there’s a higher likelihood of something funded through personal care and goodwill from a developer, or user choice (e.g. donations) being good to the end user, rather than force (e.g. keep paying us monthly or you can no longer open your project files)
Blender makes most of it off corporate donors, don’t they? They procide value to those corporations and they want a say in what gets built next.
Build something for the common man and you don’t get 20 Fortune 500 companies sponsoring you. Though some very niche projects do still get very passionate supporters. Bevy engine has been able to hire full time people like Alice who was already working on it nearly full time before she even got hired.
They make the majority (about 47% from largest corporate donors, another 10% from other corporate donors), but they make the remaining amounts from individuals:
Individuals (17% or about 440k euros/year)
Blender Market (6% or about 149k euros/yr)
Misc. Large Donations (10% or about 250k euros/yr)
Generic Small Donations (10% or about 260k euros/yr)
That’s over 800k euros/yr not from corporations. They currently spend around 2.5m/yr on all costs, but some of that is for things like grants that they don’t necessarily have to give out, but sure, it doesn’t cover all of it, but I’m sure Blender could theoretically operate just at a smaller scale if all corporate donations entirely pulled out.
I’m not saying this funding model works for every project out there, but it does show that software that’s free for the end user can still be funded without coercion.
On top of that, it’s not necessarily bad for a project to have corporations funding it. Let’s say Adobe goes the Blender route and runs entirely off donations. How many corporations that rely on them for creative work would donate? Probably enough to keep them afloat.
But would that be worse than when every smaller individual had to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the same software, while Adobe did everything they could to charge them more, and even make cancelling your subscription cost a fee? I doubt it.
It’s not necessarily perfect, but it’s still much better.
Getting paid for your work isn’t necessarily antithetical to developing free software. Free means free as in cost and freedom for the end user, not as in free of compensation to the developer(s).
For example, Blender is free software, yet the Blender foundation’s Development Fund brings in about a quarter million dollars monthly in donations to fund the actual development of the project.
I will say though, I certainly don’t agree with the original point that “the only ‘nice indie software’ is free software.” There are great indie projects that you can pay for, that still aren’t exploitative, just as there are indie and corporate projects that are exploitative. I just think there’s a higher likelihood of something funded through personal care and goodwill from a developer, or user choice (e.g. donations) being good to the end user, rather than force (e.g. keep paying us monthly or you can no longer open your project files)
Blender makes most of it off corporate donors, don’t they? They procide value to those corporations and they want a say in what gets built next.
Build something for the common man and you don’t get 20 Fortune 500 companies sponsoring you. Though some very niche projects do still get very passionate supporters. Bevy engine has been able to hire full time people like Alice who was already working on it nearly full time before she even got hired.
They make the majority (about 47% from largest corporate donors, another 10% from other corporate donors), but they make the remaining amounts from individuals:
That’s over 800k euros/yr not from corporations. They currently spend around 2.5m/yr on all costs, but some of that is for things like grants that they don’t necessarily have to give out, but sure, it doesn’t cover all of it, but I’m sure Blender could theoretically operate just at a smaller scale if all corporate donations entirely pulled out.
I’m not saying this funding model works for every project out there, but it does show that software that’s free for the end user can still be funded without coercion.
On top of that, it’s not necessarily bad for a project to have corporations funding it. Let’s say Adobe goes the Blender route and runs entirely off donations. How many corporations that rely on them for creative work would donate? Probably enough to keep them afloat.
But would that be worse than when every smaller individual had to pay hundreds of dollars a year for the same software, while Adobe did everything they could to charge them more, and even make cancelling your subscription cost a fee? I doubt it.
It’s not necessarily perfect, but it’s still much better.