this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Most FOSS users use FOSS because of the first letter in the word. If FOSS users were happy to pay €10 a month, the funding problem for FOSS would be long gone.
But ask yourself: when did you last donate money to FOSS?
Free as in speech, friend. I donate to multiple FOSS projects every month.
The “free” in FOSS does not mean price.
Yeah, but, it does.
Yes, you might be able to ask for money for the service of distributing or servicing GPL code. But then again: if it's not actually free as in free beer, nobody's going to use it.
Check out this article: https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-Open-Source-Entwickler-arbeiten-sich-an-AI-Bugs-krank-11308345.html
Curl currently has a whopping 23 sponsors. Curl. You know, that basic piece of software shipped on pretty much every single device running some form of Linux-based OS.
The same goes for pretty much every project, especially those that aren't directly user-facing.
I was just being pedantic and corrected what is meant by the term “free software”, not actually arguing for or against what you were saying :)
Yes, of course, a project being paid will mean that a lot fewer people will actually use it. I wouldn't say nobody, though. As an example, there's the DeArrow browser addon which is free, but costs $1 once (with easy ways to circumvent that payment). Yet many people have paid for it anyway.
As for curl, the article says that the 23 sponsors you mentioned are only corporate sponsors. There are hundreds of people donating to the curl project, which is probably still unreasonably low, but not as dire as “only 23” would suggest. Obviously each of these donates a much lower amount, so it may still not amount to much (but I don't know enough to say that).
But in the end, as I said, you're probably mostly right, there would be very few users of free software if it was paid. Although there are also lots of users of proprietary paid software, so who knows.
Yeah, "nobody" was obviously a bit polemic, but if you'd have to pay the same money for FOSS as for CSS, I doubt many people would pay for e.g. Gimp over Photoshop.
Also, there's the structure issue. Windows is developed mostly in-house, and the few bits they don't DIY they pay for.
An average Linux distro is developed by easily over 1000 individual little projects. And yes, theoretically people could pay for Fedora, and the Fedora people then pay a whole tree of dependant projects, but that would be incredibly complicated.
I don't mind paying for the beer so long as the speech is free.
I can respect the speakeasy mindset
If it's something i use regularly and i don't hate i buy a license or make a dono.