Fair point. I feel like adequately funding free software development is a larger unsolved problem, that's a bit beyond the scope of a forum thread.
Anecdotally, I like what the developer of Blink Shell[0] has done. The app is 100% free software[1] under GPL3, so you can easily build it yourself with XCode, upload to your phone, and use as usual from there, which isn't a big hurdle for the target audience. But I bought it. At the time IIRC it costed 20 bucks on the App Store. I bought it because it was incredibly frictionless to pay the money (Apple is good at that), and it felt good to support the developer of a tool I liked and used.
So it leaves me wondering, where are the big obstacles. All other things being equal, I will choose a free/libre solution, but we know things are far from equal.
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Have you offered to pay them anything? At least a good fraction of what you pay to the proprietary alternative?
Fair point. I feel like adequately funding free software development is a larger unsolved problem, that's a bit beyond the scope of a forum thread.
Anecdotally, I like what the developer of Blink Shell[0] has done. The app is 100% free software[1] under GPL3, so you can easily build it yourself with XCode, upload to your phone, and use as usual from there, which isn't a big hurdle for the target audience. But I bought it. At the time IIRC it costed 20 bucks on the App Store. I bought it because it was incredibly frictionless to pay the money (Apple is good at that), and it felt good to support the developer of a tool I liked and used.
So it leaves me wondering, where are the big obstacles. All other things being equal, I will choose a free/libre solution, but we know things are far from equal.
[0]: https://blink.sh [1]: https://github.com/blinksh/blink
Would you please take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31296803 and share your thoughts?
I have a lot of thoughts on this but I'm not comfortable sharing some of it in public. Can you shoot me an email? kamil@rollc.at