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03e3d237 | 1 years ago (raw) | export | reply | flag 
 It took me far too long to see that there are two distinct groups of people who love open source/Free software:

1. Those who primary motivation is to build things together and create a more open and collaborative world.

2. Those who don't want to pay for anything or be told what to do.

The later motivation is not a bad motivation but it is a self interested motive. I continuously on find myself surprised when people from the later group are totally out of alignment with my own values.

I guess the interesting thing is that it is hard to distinguish between these two mindsets by simply looking at a person or seeing what stickers they have on their laptops. You really have to know a person. And of course, the line is often blurred, because no one likes to pay for things or be told what to do.
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Louis :emacs: | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 @019aa5eb I think there is at least a third group, because I find myself in neither:

I like to use free and open source because it is "the right thing to do". Also, I usually donate well when I use something that has real production value.

Of course it is not possible to donate to 300 different npm packages, that are fetched when I add a single dependency.

When I find bugs or have ideas I also usually take the time to file proper bug reports and sometimes, if knowledge permits, send a patch. IMHO: The currency in free and open source is not money, it is time. 

Example: https://caprover.com/
It is a perfect PaaS replacement which runs on two of my production servers and saved me a lot of money. I've donated over $500 to the project.

Or https://github.com/h2non/imaginary, an image resizer that I use in production, donated $180.

Or https://github.com/samber/lo, a functional Go library that makes coding in Go enjoyable for me. 

On the other side, with the exception of Tuner, the FOSS app I created and released for Linux, I rarely publish any work of my own.