aevaAug 14, 2024

#poll Have you ever paid for software when it was optional to do so?

EDIT: If you only occasionally pay for software when it is optional, please reply with what sorts of software you typically do and don't pay for.

yes, always
7.9%
yes, but only rarely
78%
no, but maybe some day
9.6%
no, lol
4.5%
Poll ended at .
Show threadaevaAug 14, 2024
related
Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024

I think it is probably safe to call it here. The overwhelming majority of you support the development of software you use to varying degrees of "sometimes", which is pretty cool.

From the replies to this thread, I gather it's relatively common for people to only support projects that are already relatively mature and popular, which is an interesting chicken and egg problem. Also you don't get anything if you don't ask, but it works better if the asking doesn't feel extractive. Not surprising

Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024
Lots of people also unsurprisingly strongly prefer one-off donations or payments instead of recurring ones to support long term development, but are also often vocal about how they are entitled to updates and improvements long term. That seems to imply that "growth" is the unsaid expectation of how a project should be funded long term.
Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024
It seems like applications that people interact with directly have the best shot at being funded through a pay-what-you-want or donation based model. Within that, games have a bit of an advantage over regular applications by more commonly having an end date to their development without being considered "abandoned".
Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024
Not a lot of mention of funding libraries, middleware, and critical infrastructure though. I guess most folks just assume that's someone else's problem
Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024
The part where many people tend to expect the software to already be relatively mature and high impact to give support leaves an open question of how new development is meant to be funded, since it takes a lot of work to get there. I suppose that's where stuff like grants come in. It's a shame society is set up so the general population is coerced into being a cheap labor source for the whims of the wealthy, or we'd probably have a lot more high impact R&D happening outside of corporations.
Show threadaevaAug 15, 2024
For the folks splitting hairs on "more than rarely": if you're on Linux there's probably a few thousand libraries on your computer that are necessary for your computer to be able to do all the things you want it to do. This is probably true for other operating systems, but Windows doesn't list them all every time it runs updates lol. Based on the replies, I'm very skeptical that this many people go out of their way to donate to anything resembling more than a tiny minority of those projects.
Show thread>>>>>>>

@aeva on the other hand, the vast majority of those projects are software that you couldn't give money to even if yuo did want to. so its not really optional if theres no option.

but, its hard to say how much of the software on my computer *does* have that option, so im not sure how the ratio works out accounting for that

Aug 15, 2024 at 6:35pmWeb