Not hating on open source, just let people use what fits their expectations and needs and stop deterring them with gatekeeping :P
UX = user experience
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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FOSS is great but also developers' gotta eat
Amen. And he got screwed from the Reddit api fiasco. If i remember correctly he was on the hook for as much as $250k in refunds because he's had to shut the app down and refund subscribers.
The guy has to make a living, so I don't begrudge him that one bit.
How fucking bad does your math need to be to not realize that 250k in refunds for a 6 month period where the app is unusable equals 250k in revenue for the first 6 months of the year? All y'all are like "dev needs to eat, he deserves our support!" and the guy's pulling down over 500k/year.
That was Apollo, not Sync.
I'm pretty sure he already made millions from the app.
So he should start working for free? Or just retire and not create an app that many people enjoy?
Neither. I didn't say anything. But since you challenge me to say something, I'd say since he's very likely financially very secure, he could look for ways to monetize that do not mine user data.
The data it collects is purely from Google's ad services. Removing ads removed all data collection as well from what other users with duck duck go were measuring.
That's our bar here? That someone who has put in years and years of hard Dev effort, every day, built up a community, took risks, etc, should just be happy he has food on the table?
Fuck that noise. I don't care if he's already s multi millionaire, he can charge whatever he wants, and we can choose to pay it or not. The man is running a business model here. He's not done weekend warrior FOSS hacker. He deserves to be paid for his efforts.
People can spend money on both, you know. There's no hard rule that they have to be mutually exclusive.
Listen mate. The issue here isn't that people are saying that devs are starving. It's that people here are some how associating someone who is (ostensibly)comfortable in life with the Bourgeois. You are not a class traitor for working your ass off on a product that many of your fellow Proletariats enjoy. Quite the opposite in fact. The real Bourgeois are the people who own the very server farms the app lives on. The real Bourgeois are the owners of the land the server farms live on. They are the people who are so rich you forget they exist.
Oh, well as long as you're "pretty sure".
The top comment said that he's "gotta eat", the other one said he got "screwed over by the API fiasco". I'm not saying at all that he shouldn't charge for his app, I'm not even saying he should change anything. I just don't think it makes sense to act like he's some poor starving guy. He's a relatively rich businessman doing (very good) business.
All of course based on you being pretty sure he's "made millions" from the app.
It's funny how NONE of these comments saying that the dev earned millions have a legitimate source. It's always just "pretty sure", "I assumed", "I figured" etc.
I wish we would all stop making things up and trying to use those same things as proof. Lol
I love the idea of Lemmy itself being FOSS but individual instances and apps being a competitive marketplace of for profit businesses.
That way profitable entities with skin in the game can contribute back to the core, as can anyone, while ensuring the communities exist on servers that actually have some kind of monetization.
Exactly! This is the playbook for how Linux has gained such a mainstay - while GNU/Linux on the desktop may still be pretty small, the extensibility and open-source nature of the platform has meant it's been able to take over on all sort of alternative platforms - Android and Steam Deck being the big ones in the consumer space, but also larger distros being used regularly in enterprise/web hosting.
If everyone had refused to embrace Android or Steam Deck or any of the other distros run and maintained by for-profit corporations due to some preconceived idea of what the 'correct' way to use Linux is, it would still be doomed to irrelevance outside of tech circles.
Red Hat is the 800lb gorilla in the room in that aspect. They put out a rock-solid product and their support is probably the best I've ever used regardless of any other factor.
They also pretty much own the Government/Gov Contractor Linux space because of the support and how simple it is to apply STIGs.
developers’ what