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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

>Organizations with a software budget should be happier to pay a fair price for ethical, user-first software from a friendly vendor than for a closed-source product from a megacorp.

Yet we don’t pay for Linux, grep, vim, etc, etc. Why is your open source project the only one worthy of requiring payment?

IMO you should drop the doublespeak of claiming these are open source values while simultaneously charging money. It’s offensive to people who contribute to actual open source projects like matrix, clang, Linux, kubernetes, and on and on.

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Grep and vim are a much smaller magnitude than Linux, so don't mix the two. And you do pay for Linux indirectly, it ain't written by some developer in their basements out of their good heart for a long time. It's written by Intel, Nvidia, cloud vendors' etc - full salaried employees. You just pay for it via hardware or cloud fees.

But to be honest your stance is extremely detached from reality. It's a huge privilege to be able to work on a hobby project, people tend to need food and a place to live, you know?

I worked on Linux, I know how it’s funded. And it’s not by charging people

Grep and vim are obviously stand ins for a myriad of tools that together are much larger than Linux. And even Linux still has unpaid volunteers and even the majority corporate contributors are not that relevant to the discussion because none of them have control over the project to the degree that they could enshittify it.

> people tend to need food and a place to live, you know

That has never been enough reason to require that others support your business model. I for one don't need or want any more "products" in my life, especially ones that are or depend on services I can only get from a single vendor.

Etymologically, a product is a thing which is produced. But it's unpleasant to think about how the sausage gets made, so nobody wants to consider the goods in their lives as products. They want their Nikes to simply pop into existence before them.

Tools like grep and vim dangle by a thread based on volunteer work, and open-source maintainers are famously prone to burnout. Some tools survive by being very small—nobody's out there updating `ls` every month—but the only sustainable way to maintain a large piece of software is with a salaried workforce.

You may not want to interact with the systems that produce Zulip for you, but you should be suspicious of goods that hide their status as products. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Do you think clang, linux, and kubernetes could ever exist and survive in their current forms without the work of salaried developers? Volunteer maintenance is not sustainable; the long hours of unpaid labour are famously prone to causing burnout.

Free software is free as in speech, not free as in beer. If you want to save your cash, go use discord. If you're not paying, you're the product.

How is it double-speak? The "free" part doesn't mean "free beer"...

Huh? Where did he argue that you shouldn't pay for those things?

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