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  > Most people won't pay for something if they don't have to.

Sure, but most people don't need to. Only a small portion need to for the model to be viable. Scale is useful here.

It doesn't work because people that make $100k+ salaries wont buy their "friend" a beer. It's not failing because a bunch of poor people don't donate.

And it is viable because many things already operate this way. The most profitable ones have just convinced companies to donate. That shouldn't be required, but I'm not ignoring the reality.

Besides, this is a reality that is solvable simply by a small percentage of people going "you know what? I will donate". Not "everybody", just a very very small proportion. Let's take ripgrep as an example. Who knows how many people use this, but there's over 64k stars. Let's say 1% donate $5/mo. That's $3.2k/mo for burntsushi, I'm pretty sure he'd be happy with that. He's also a prolific HN user so maybe he'll even respond.

My point is that all it takes is a mental shift from a small number of people. This isn't some "we need huge collaboration therefore it'll never happen" type of thing, this is "I can take action and have meaningful impact today" type of thing.

by Barbing3 hours ago|

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>My point is that all it takes is a mental shift from a small number of people. This isn't some "we need huge collaboration therefore it'll never happen" type of thing, this is "I can take action and have meaningful impact today" type of thing.

Always good to promote these apparent small wins in case the catch on. Do suspect the shift to make, instead of hoping our psychology changes en masse:

Change the model to one of the freebie models that works for high-income earners. High-income earners are OK to make purchases of tangible things where they're promised good is done for the world. Then they enjoy their music and wine (at the gala), or tote bag or whatnot.

We gonna be invited to the first Text Editor Gala?! Maybe not. 50/50 raffle supporting a text editor dev, though, maybe... (ugh a little gambley)

tl;dr give the self-wealth-protecting psychology of the wealthy an out to help them justify their good deed, like NPR sponsor gifts

(to execute - cut some deals with concert venues, restaurants, handmade good purveyors... obtain discounts... then work with developers to set up bespoke relevant rewards for given donation tiers. first part of this plan could be a decent task for the non-developers who wanna contribute to OSS)

by godelski33 minutes ago|

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I mean whatever it takes. But these days we're fighting a huge attention and disinformation campaign that is trying to teach you that you can't make any change and overload you with a million problems. I hope it breaks soon. I hope it can't continue forever. The world has always changed, and will continue to, because of the actions of a few. A small cog in a big machine can still take down the entire machine. You don't have to do everything, but you should do something. Even if it is something small. Small to you is often big to those being helped.

by backscratches13 hours ago|

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And yet the majority of all computers dont just have some open source software, their operating systems are open source. The worlds digital infrastructure is largely open source.

by godelski11 hours ago|

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Not to mention the majority of business software depends on open source software too! Be it the thousands of libraries we use (so we don't have to implement ourselves and we get better integration with others) to literally building on top of open source stuff (Android, every slicer for your 3d printer, all your servers, and literally millions of other things)

by backscratches11 hours ago|

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Exactly, this is what I was getting at. The guy above uses open source software every time he touches anything electric.

by godelski7 hours ago|

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Agreed. I'm often impressed hope people on HN of all places don't realize how prolific open source software is. Doesn't matter if you throw a literal or figurative stone in a random direction, you'll probably hit something that uses OSS.

Btw, my comment was intended to append yours, not counter or argue. Sorry if it came off that way