Why Making Money from Free Software Matters (The H)

Posted Apr 27, 2010 14:32 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters (The H) by paulj
Parent article: Why Making Money from Free Software Matters (The H)

Here's my data point:

I have spent about $1500 on free software. All of that was via voluntary donations to free software projects; I have never purchased a support contract.

I've donated a few hundred bucks to the FSF, and we've had a corporate LWN subscription for a few years.

I have spent about $50 on proprietary software; that was back in 1981 when I purchased the EDTASM assembler for my Coco. Since then, I've spent nothing on proprietary software other than the very-hard-to-avoid (Coco ROM BASIC, BIOSes in my PCs, Nintendo games for my kids, etc.)

You may find this surprising given my other postings, but it's perfectly rational. It makes perfect economic sense for me not to pay for software, just as it makes perfect economic sense for me to run a company that sells proprietary software.

It makes no economic sense for me to donate money to free software projects. That was done out of a sense of moral or ethical duty, just as giving to any other charity would be.

I suspect I'm an outlier in your poll. :)