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Comment by theredbox | Hacker News Reader

Free software was once necessary to balance out the astronomical costs of enterprise software. But this is not the case anymore.

Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.

A lot of so called “free” software is alive and kicking strong because it is funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.

In a sense using VS Code or VS Codium is just as bad as relying on an obscure SAP module. We should all support small and medium sized SMEs like the creators of Sublime Text.

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>Free software is in this day and age not sustainable and using it it without contributing a dime is parasitic and detrimental to the health of the sw industry.

That is completely untrue. Merely using free software has no negative effect on it's continued development.

Even filing issues and bug reports are contributions if they are of high enough quality. And in fact, many projects allow you to buy support or new features for money.

>funded by mega corporations doing it to kill the smaller competition.

That's also untrue. Companies profit in a myriad of ways by providing their software as free software.

EDIT: to the flagged reply below:

- OpenJDK is currently funded by Oracle

- start with these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-sourc... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_economics

Not good enough. I want to make money with my apps. I support the idea of shipping the source upon purchase only.

Welcome to open source.

That’s a perfectly valid business model for open source software and there are people and companies using it.

I believe it's against GPL to hide the source like that.

If anyone is parasitic, it's people selling their software. They're all using a lot of free libraries and tooling to actually produce working software.

While I do agree that people deserve to be paid for their work, blaming others producing a superior product for free is not a sane worldview.

You should donate to free software, tooling etc you use and pay their developers a decent wage like that.

And if you're a maintainer for a free software, start to charge corporations for support. That's the only way you can convince them to part with their money.

People are not producing superior products for free out of their good will. And these are often not so superior either. It is a simple balancing game of a good enough tool vs a good enough vendor lock-in.

Donations do not work and developers should not be forced to beg. FOSS is a broken model for all of us. At the end of the day you are feeding the behemoths one way or another.

In many cases, they are doing it out of good will. Emacs, gcc, countless languages and frameworks, most of the npm ecosystem, etc all have a substantial portion of “because it’s good for the community and now that it’s written, sharing it costs me little additional”.

That only works for products with a B2B business model possible. That's not all products. And it's hard to build something with a "sane" business model when there's a lot of VC-funded products that are acting as loss leaders to suck the oxygen out of the room so they can develop a monopoly in a space.

Free software helps small businesses. Most devs can’t write new code so they have to patch together solutions from the NPM LEGO box.

Yeah, figuring out a good donation model where people can pay for the free software they use, and corporations can pay from their budget for a reason other than "just out of the goodness of our heart" is one of the biggest problems facing the Free Software movement today.

I personally love the Blender model, where the community are able sustain full time developers with donations while the software remains open. Building a community that want to invest is really important for sustainability of a project.

Why should we support small and medium businesses over larger corporations? Small and medium sized businesses are just as likely to treat their employees poorly and to screw over their customers as any large corporation.

You're right. Too many people take freedom for granted. It's easy when it's someone else doing all the work.

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