Most open source apps that have a cost I've run across usually have the option of building it yourself for free. But if you want prepackaged with support you pay.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2021
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Libre Culture
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What is libre culture?
Libre culture is all about empowering people. While the general philosophy stems greatly from the free software movement, libre culture is much broader and encompasses other aspects of culture such as music, movies, food, technology, etc.
Some beliefs include but aren't limited to:
- That copyright should expire after a certain period of time.
- That knowledge should be available to people, not locked away.
- That no entity should have unjust control or possession of others.
- That mass surveillance is about mass control, not justice.
- That we can all band together to help liberate each other.
Check out this link for more.
Rules
I've looked into the ways other forums handle rules, and I've distilled their policies down into two simple ideas.
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Please show common courtesy: Let's make this community one that people want to be a part of.
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Please keep posts generally on topic
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No NSFW content
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When sharing a Libre project, please include the name of its license in the title. For example: “Project name and summary (GPL-3.0)”
Libre culture is a very very broad topic, and while it's perfectly okay for a conversation to stray, I do ask that we keep things generally on topic.
Related Communities
- Libre Culture Memes
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- ActivityPub
- Linux
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- Free (libre) Software Replacements
- Libre Software
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Helpful Resources
- The Respects Your Freedom Certification
- Libre GNU/Linux Distros
- Wikimedia Foundation
- The Internet Archive
- Guide to DRM-Free Living
- LibreGameWiki
- switching.software
- How to report violations of the GNU licenses
- Creative Commons Licenses
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Yeah, most FOSS companies also offer their specific platform for their software for a price. Depending on the complexity of self-hosting it can be much cheaper to just buy access to the platform
Additionally, the source code of free software only needs to be released to your users, not necessarily the general public. This means that if you have a niche client who doesn't want to write their own software, it can be a steady income stream, and you can set it up so they have to be a customer to be an initial user
From what I remember, the FSF has nothing against selling your product, it's the source code which has to be available.
In other words, you can sell a free software, yet users can pool together the resources to buy your product and install it multiple times, or they can even just get the source and compile it, and even redistribute it
ElementaryOS is some kind of an example, you can get the source code, but they ask you to pay (it's not mandatory though and you can get everything for free) to get the ISO file.
Other examples would be Ardour and Fritzing, both have source code available for free, but not their binaries. So if you want to have it for free, you have to pay with time of compiling :p
OnlyOffice
Threema is free software but requires a paid license to use it with their network. In this case the license is presumably validated on the server end and this check can't be avoided by modifying the client.
Qt
I would say Zrythm for sure (see https://www.zrythm.org/en/download.html), https://gingkowriter.com (source code available), and arguably Ghost (https://ghost.org).
FOSS tends to be paid for beforehand or for support.
RHEL, for example, provides an excellent OS with support.
Godot provides anyone with the ability to make games, but when a big company wants it extended so their game can be better, they pay money upfront, so the Godot team is - for those companies who want more - free as in 'free speech', but they also pay for work.
Lastly, for the sake of completeness, there are games which were paid for, and later gained a GPL licence.
People have mentioned 'donations', but I'm not sure if that amounts to any real development. Maybe it does, but the so-called 'donations' to the Linux foundation aren't typically charitable, but made by corporations who use Linux to make money, so they're more similar to Godot than actual charity.
Plenty! But it's not something you pay to download. Organizations ranging from large companies, FOSS companies like SuSE/RedHat/Canonical, down to individual contractors develop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custom_software and often contribute to FOSS in the process.
For example look for "employers" "by lines changed" in https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/