Are donation whores killing the spirit of open source?

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zdnet.com/article/after-seven-months-and-no-microsoft-patch-internet-explorer-8-vulnerability-is-revealed/
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yea people should just work all day for nothing lol

It has the potential to be extremely cancerous, yes.

It can be good, it can be bad

Worker 1 sets up Patreon: gets 500$ doing an ok job fixing bugs assigned to w\e

Worker 2 sets up Patreon: gets 500$ doing a shitty job, slow releases and poor feedback \w community

If people donate carefully to one that deserves it, its fine, the idiots will stop getting money and the money income will dry up.

Oh no, they should by all means receive donations and shit for their work if it's deserving of it.

The problem is that recently this trend surfaced where everybody is feeling entitled to receiving donation and rewards for everything they do. Everyone has patreons, everyone expects payment and people who are retarded enough to jump out of their cash to fund it are put on pedestal.
Just look at OP's pic, guy wouldn't have fixed a problem with his software if he didn't get paid.

Imagine you're using OpenSSL and heartbleed bug surfaces and the whole group of project maintainers just goes like "support us on patreon and maybe we'll fix it" and then 9 million forks surface with that 1 bug fix and then every single one of those forks has its own set of bugs that won't be fixed without donation money etc.
I know that's slippery slope, but it'd definitely happen

OP is 100% right, this recent "DONATE ME OR I WONT DO IT/YOU'RE NOT GETTING IT" trend is cancerous to the open source scene.
There's no problem in donations, they've been an integral part of open source, freeware and file sharing communities for decades, but this entitlement is pure cancer

I hope you understand the difference

Theres asking for donations and theres just giving an option to. The cancer is people who say things like "i left my job to do this program" and because of their choices, expect me to pay for free software.

If i like it and use it, I'll donate. Its simple, no need for this proxy 'buy my software' donation bullshit

People have been giving money to the uBlock scammer for 1 year and a half. You can't expect donators to be smart enough to triage donation whores. Distributions should start blacklisting packages and plugins from people like them.

>The cancer is people who say things like "i left my job to do this program"
The creator of the Menu Wizard extension is a prime example of this. He even shows his children's photos to beg for donations (and also adds malware to the extension).

A good alternative is addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/menu-filter/

Ha! This is already happening? I was all set to make a long post about the probable way this would turn out thinking it was just at the beginning, but it seems to be a little further along than I thought.

>Worker 1 gets paid.
>Workers 2-9, who were working for free for their love of the project, now decide to hold back their work to see if they can get in on the gravy train. They now go out and start to market themselves.
>Marketing ware erupt. Lies are piled on top of lies.
>bad products are shilled to the max. All products are released with series of problems so they can offer to fix them if only the price is right.
>wages become determined more by celebrity than any skill. Wage cucks need to devote a portion of their income to bribing celebrity programmers to come to their project to bring attention and donations to them.
>Anyone still "doing it for free" endlessly slut-shamed for undermining the economy.

A bribery economy is laughably bad. There's a reason we went proprietary -- so the focus can be on the product.

github the central of SJW manipulation and scamming isn't the whole dev world m8

>reeeeeeeee you mean i have to *pay* for stuff?
>wtf i hate open source now
the spirit of open source: 'only when it's convenient'

as long as its not like gittip or something.

win10widgets.com/

Does that shit still exist? Makes me fucking rage, woman getting donations for getting woman. Last time I looked the top person getting donated to was a woman with zero repositories on github.

Open source is supposed to be free. If everyone stats charging eachother for every script and library the loonix will die within a year.

Actually why would I use a buggy and unstable product if I had to pay for it? I'd just buy an apple product and be done with it.

>Open source is supposed to be free.

Not really. Where did you hear that?

>Actually why would I use a buggy and unstable product if I had to pay for it?

Did you buy Windows?

>the spirit of open source
Fuck off.

>“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.

/thread

>Not really. Where did you hear that?
That's the whole point of it.

>Did you buy Windows?
I actually did buy the windows 7 I'm using.

What's the point of paying for the underdeveloped buggy shit written by some neckbeards in a basement, when you can buy actual microsoft and apple products?

user, you hit the nail right on the head. I'm sure this thing came out of good intentions. The developers are working on some open source project and have time only for the important issues. Then, someone who would love to have some cacamaney feature that lies somewhere forgotten in a branch with commits from 6 years ago donates, to make it worth their time. Now, some developers wisen up that if there is enough demand for a feature, money will come so they do fuck-all. This would not neccesarily be bad, but as points out, money will initially go out to shit primadona programmers untill word gets out that it's shit and the buyers become weary, kind of like what started to happen with kickstarter

> what's the point of paying for the underdeveloped buggy shit written by some neckbeards in a basement, when you can buy underdeveloped buggy shit written by some neckbeards in a basement with marketing from a shilling department

>gittip
It became Gratipay. The developer of my music player uses it: gratipay.com/deadbeef/

I understand. Those are some good points you raised.

Microsoft and Apple developers are fucking super geniuses with glorious upperscale lives in the best cities of California, not "neckbeards in a basement"

>That's the whole point of it.
No, it's not. Been to Stallman's conference and he clearly said it meant free as liberation. Paying for development is part of free software. What you shouldn't pay for is source code, not development effort.

If that is the case, I'm actually pretty happy about it user. Yeah, some woman is living without working, I get it, but consider that because she has 0 output, nothing will come of it. All that money will go in a black hole. Instead of having a shiny eSJeW sticker on whatever code she made and have a legacy, nothing will come of it. The philosophy will go nowhere ("even if people donate money to me I still can't do shit becuase muh soggy knees & muh her ass mint") and, more to the point, all that donactivism will amount to nothing. Capitalism can be glorious sometimes.

Microsoft programmers are 85% pajeets in Inida and 10% pajeets in the USA. And then there's 5% who don't program themselves but just check on the pajeets. Microsoft literally has 0 super genius programmers whatever that means.

>25 bucks for two and a half hours work
open source everyone

I ain't gay, but 20 euroshekels are 20 euroshekels

Donations was and is a part of free software movement
gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Manifesto.html

>who is Mark Russinovich

>Just look at OP's pic, guy wouldn't have fixed a problem with his software if he didn't get paid.
How do you know?

That's just over minimum wage.

Doesn't change that money corrupts. An economy based on generosity is free of any need to lie. You don't need to boast and you don't need to shill because you're not selling anything. You don't need to hold back on your offer to generate artificial scarcity and boost the apparent value.
A single donation doesn't corrupt that economy, but if it becomes obvious that there's a sizable base of suckers to be parted from their money, the economy will reorganize itself to do just that. People who worked for free will now shake their tip jar. People who made do with what they had will cry how their impoverishment is utterly strangling them, and how your donation will release them and throw open the floodgates of productivity! Their efforts will no longer be towards actual best product, but what markets the best -- glitz and glamour and hype over boring functionality and utility.

I'm a producer for two free economies -- I encode/release and I seed 24/7. If suddenly people started getting paid for this, would I still sit here and do it for free? NO. I'd withhold my releases and stop seeding the torrents I'm active on until I received as much money I thought I could get to uncork each. I'd jump right on the microtransaction bandwagon, dripping out an episode at a time instead of releasing as a batch if the market let me get away with it. I'd like to think I could keep to the principles of honesty, openness, and fairness, but I'm not sure that greed wouldn't get the better of me. "Oh, the audio dropped out halfway through the finale? How careless of me! I *would* rush your patch right out, but, you see, I'm just swamped with work! I don't see how anything but a donation could up the timetable on this!"

>Please seed!
That'll be $3.99 a minute.

It isn't something where a few donations here and there would hurt, but it could quickly devolve into a world of Kickstarter/Gofundme/Early Access cancer.

Free is just comfy.

so many good projects and mods died because of donation whores.
fucking red power man.

>workers getting paid
>slippery slope
LOL wat?

I really couldn't care less if a dude makes an open source software that is good enough to become a standard and then demands donations for further work on it. Good for him. You think people should work for free?

How about we go with the Microsoft model and just sweep the security flaws under the rug and never fix them?

zdnet.com/article/after-seven-months-and-no-microsoft-patch-internet-explorer-8-vulnerability-is-revealed/