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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Blender, Wikipedia, Linux, RedHat and even the project you're using right now: Lemmy
There actually are a lot of people making a living out of making open source projects
Ill admit im not very familiar with blender, linux, or redhat, so ill look into those -- thank you.
My understanding is that nobody owns lemmy, rather people own the instances that make up lemmy. Which is definitely in the spirit of FOSS, but based on my understanding (happy to be proven wrong) I dont think its accurate to say the creators of Lemmy are making a living from it. You can donate to the admins of the instances you use, I suppose.
Likewise, isn't the main source of income for Wikipedia donations? They ask me for one every time I'm on the site.
So other than semantics, what's really the difference in making a donation to a service like Wikipedia, and paying for Sync? You can think of paying to remove ads as a donation if that helps, but the fact remains that lemmy is already available for free, and is much smaller than organizations like Wikipedia or Linux. Dude has got to eat.
Nope. The devs make a living out of it. They work on Lemmy full time. They are sponsored by NLnet and are paid for every feature they implement
Interesting, I didn't know that; thanks for the info.
Compleatly forgot to answer your other quesntion:
Yes the main income is donations. The difference is that you don't need to pay if you can't afford it and people who donate are generally paying more on average. The huge difference is that everyone has access to everything without paying.
Imagine what would happen if you would have to pay to use Wikipedia: nobody would use it. The content is made by users and if they would have made it a paid encyclopedia it wouldn't have any users.
Also, I gladly pay for subscriptions for services that actually cost money to run in the developer's side.
But that's not the case. It shows content from a free service. I get it that developers need to get paid, but if they don't have any recurring expenditure, it should be based on donations.
You don't need to pay for Sync if you can't afford it either, though. A free version exists, the only noteworthy difference is that it shows ads. To your point, there are technically a few gated features behind the Ultra subscription, but these are niche inclusions that 99% of people probably wouldn't use even if they were included for free. I think of them more as an added bonus for supporting the dev.