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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

It is mind boggling how much funding there would be for the Gimp/Krita/Inkscape/Penpot developers if every designer gave them 5% of what they give to Adobe.

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They kind of suck at asking for donations.

Look at Wikipedia. They are grossly OVER-funded, they have more money they could ever need in fact And they run purely on donations.

I always wanted to donate for Firefox but they don't offer me an option to do so.

Or look at Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/donating/

Not clear call to action. Lot's of confusion options. Not the best marketing.

You are welcome to propose more efficient ways of funding OSS.

This is correct and sad.

Open source would be much better with sustainable funding models. But hard to see how this could happen in SaaS dominated modern world.

We "just" need to flip the narrative. Let's stop talking about "services" that people need to pay for and make FOSS something that people invest so they can (collectively) own later.

People love to shit on crypto, but no other industry got so many small-scale, open source projects that got funded when people have high hopes of making bank from it.

I wonder if we could get people to invest in open source projects that were tied to a short position on the proprietary counterpart.

It would be better off if people stopped using cuckold licenses like MIT, instead of GPL and its various strains.

Indeed. What concerns me is that with the current AI trends, the amount of funding that the Adobes of the world will put into AI for their products will only widen the gap between OSS and proprietary solutions.

I see it as an opportunity. "Libre" models are already matching state-of-the-art models, so it's not like this power will not be available to the OSS developers.

Indeed but adapting the open models to the product costs massive amounts in compute and engineering.

Not sure the oss community can keep up.

Same applies to most open source tools, that many devs use while expecting themselves to be paid.

I usually buy books from most projects I use, do occasional donations to projects when they are relevant enough for my work,...

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