Sad but quite true :(
I wonder when someone will come up with a hipstery, fancy-looking printer that sells on the basis of "we don't give a crap about all that, here's a bag of ink refills,, just pay us more up-front".
All the tech startups are out there trying to get you into a subscription, I think we're getting to the point where this is annoying enough that you could sell very expensive, fashionable small-run hardware to people on the basis of not being this.
Honestly, we talk about this thing way too much for how irrelevant it is (or should be, anyway).
It's a ridiculously high end HMV that fixes none of the key issues and is absurdly overpriced. I don't understand why we're entertaining the issue at all.
I mean, I understand it, it's Apple and people somehow suspend reason when it comes to them, but... well, we shouldn't. And that's all the time and thought I'm willing to spend on this dumb thing.
No, hey, let me be clear, I don't think you're actively an ideologue, but you can absolutely disagree or actively advocate against it and still have your worldview filtered through that lens. None of us is immune to their context or their upgringing, least of all me.
What I do say is that the notion that "it's not free, it all comes from taxes" is a very active framing, and it comes from an anarchocapitalist perspective, whether you agree with it or not. Yes, there is a cost to public services. And yes, you do have to tax people to fund the government that is meant to provide those services, but paying taxes isn't the same as paying for a service, and public services aren't "services you pay with your taxes", they're... well, public services.
And in the same vein, having an industry built on tipping is not sustainable and yeah, it's a fairly (anarcho)capitalist perspective. Screw tips. You can contribute to an open source project, be it with cash, work, promotion or whatever, but you're definitely not obligated to do so and that systemmust work within those parameters. FOSS is not software paid in tips, that's not the point. It may be crowdsourced, but that's not the same thing.
So hey, I get it, you don't ideologically support those things, consciously. If you take anything from my comment let it be that you're still thinking about it from that framework and there are other ways to frame it. You're right that eventually the money has to come from somewhere, but how you frame the situation impacts which somewheres you're willing to explore.
Yeah, for sure. I'm just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.
If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn't root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling "obligated" to pay, they either won't pay anyway or won't use the software. That's not a viable option.
So you're left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is "broken" or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is... well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that's where the effort should go.
It's not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn't to you) was triggered by the notion that we "need to normalize paying for foss". I don't think that's true, and I do think it'd lead to generating a "tipping system". Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.
I'm also not fond of "we live in a system" as an argument for playing by the system's rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that's what the "system" is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn't mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.
We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can't rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn't be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.
No, it's not, and it's not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.
This is not a case of "no one", anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it's not just "a coffee", plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.
I hate this argument so, so passionately.
It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.
So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.
Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.
OK, I had to look this up, VF1 was model 1, like Virtua Racing, but the did ship a backport of Remix that did run on ST-V. More likely you remember people being excited about the idea that Saturn would just be arcade hardware at home and we'd get arcade perfect ports of Daytona and VF, which was extremely not the case.
I mostly remember the arcade being pin-sharp, which it was, but once you got the upgraded textures nobody was complaining. And we got both at once in VF2, so...
Oh, no, I had my entire world redefined at the sight of the first 3D fighting game... when I played it in arcades the year prior.
The launch version for the Saturn was... a different story. Again, by the time I was able to get my hands on a Saturn the version they were bundling was VF Remix instead, which again, mind blown, entire path in life significantly impacted, so I've always been morbidly curious about vanilla.
EDIT: For reference, for people who may be lacking some context here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubJSL5GhSZU
That's vanilla VF1, right? So... disappointed and mildly concerned?
I'm kinda joking, (kinda), because by the time I got a Saturn it came with Remix already, so I wouldn't know.
I very specifically remember it not being very fun at all, but then at the time they were pushing it as a FF7 competitor and it is extremely not that.
Silver was on the Dreamcast, though. And PC, which is where I got disappointed with it.
Yeah, fortunately softmodding acts as a backdoor to make that part of the system have a healthy afterrmarket replacement. Which is useful because man, that thing had less storage than I remembered.
I'm curious about the details, yeah. Maybe they're plugging into some API or something? Breaking some safety measure? Otherwise I really don't see how these threats aren't empty. Suing somebody for breaking EULA terms does not have a great track record, and neither does modifying things you buy or making unauthorized software for computers.
But hey, if the guy says the project is coming down, then I guess the aggressive language did the thing they wanted it to do, even if it's relatively toothless.
I agree that dev to user is best, and I agree that the current greenlight processes for game publishers are pretty busted, no arguments there. I also have bigger issues with the sub model he's not even mentioning.
In fairness, though, I think for majors with that busted greenlight process the sub model does enable some games to get made that wouldn't otherwise. Some games just don't work at full price and just can't stack up to the major productions but they do get checked out in a sub. For smaller games and devs the sub money can guarantee survival.
But that doesn't take away that a subscription-dominated market is poorer, the preservation issues or any of the other problems with that being the primary thrust. Tech guys tend to be all-in on things and think they should be THE way because more money is more optimal and if they dominate then that's more money. In reality for a content ecosystem to thrive a multi-window ecosystem is probably best. Also, I want to buy games I can own, and the less they let me do that the more I want it, so... there's that.
Different metrics, though.
I do have to disagree that this chart proves what you say it proves, though. Arguing that Rockstar in particular does not care about quality is... a sizzling hot take.
Look, there are plenty of grifters in gaming, particularly those coming from the tech side of things (not "business school" so much, honestly). And yeah, there's a lot of money to be made and the majors are going to want a piece of that pie. Which is fine, because I want them to have money to also go after the big flashy triple-A single player stuff.
But it's obviously not true that all you get from the games industry is cookie cutter GaaS stuff. It's less true by the minute. Which is not to say I want online games to go away, either. I will actively play some of the games on that list. On purpose. I don't want them to be the only thing there is to play... but fortunately they're not, so... cool?
I'm not sure if you read my comment backwards or you're just agreeing with it?
Anyway, yeah, I think hte big problem gaming subs have is that unless you have first party ownership over every game in existence you can't do the Netflix thing of pretending to be selling the only expense you're ever gonna need. The way games work you engage with them too long and they cycle around too fast, so even if there is a big pool of games they offer it's just a big fat pit of FOMO and feeling bad for seeing that game you're mildly interested in come and go without actually having played it. I already have a stressful backlog without adding the pain point of monetizing my not getting around to all the games I'd like to play.
Kinda. This is the exact opposite of that, in that they control the IP and went out to find an external dev with lots of subject matter expertise to make it.
On paper I'd say that's better than them buying Relic off of Sega, but then Sega fired a bunch of people at Relic this year, like everybody else, so what would have been better is very much up for debate.
Right? I'm guessing this is a teenage thing and we the olds just don't understand?
I mean, I keep track in the sense that I'm introverted enough to never, ever, ever call anybody socially unless I have a practical reason, but that's why social media, group chats and extroverted people exist.