* Andrew Yu via libreplanet-discuss <libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org> [2022-01-12 23:59]: > Funding has always been an issue with free software.
No, not always, I did not get that as personal impression. In fact my first encounter with free software was that I have paid for it, and continued paying for quite some time. Majority of companies in Germany and generally in European countries marketed GNU/Linux CD/DVD ROMs and later other operating systems. We were paying for books like 100 German marks which included GNU/Linux on CD-ROM. Today there are many free software projects which sell their services or otherwise profit from free software as service providers, example is Amazon, Digital Ocean, and plethora of hosting providers. Free software runs Internet, that is fact, and funding comes from its usage and provision, thus direct and indirect sales. Red Hat is still there https://www.redhat.com/en and OpenSUSE https://www.opensuse.org and I can just guess many other companies are still on market making quite a bunch of money, thus getting the funding, and also contributing back to Free Software, such as contributing to kernel and various other programs. > If people can get it for gratis, non only the people who can't > afford paying (which includes a student like me, sadly) won't pay, > the others who can afford it are just too lazy to donate. People like you and many others undergo various changes in their life. While I did pay first time for free software, and kept paying for it, that was because I was in the same time awarded with quality printed manuals, real books, and the whole package looked magically good. And in reality it was better than good as compared to how much money and time and effort I have wasted on broken Windoze. But then later I have not paid anything apart Internet for long time, I have been downloading it and updating through Internet. Then again I came to stage where I could donate to free software projects, and so I did. Yes, sometimes you will not be able to pay. But sometimes you will pay either in the form of money, or in the form of your own free software projects. Payment is not only money. Contributions, bugs, discussions, initiatives, speeches, there are many forms of "payments". > It's probably worse in China: donations aren't in the culture. Sales are in the culture in China, so just sell free software. > I can't say much about office suites because I don't use them, not > even the free ones because I use Groff and TeX. Recently for many documents I am using Asciidoctor and Asciidoctor PDF: Asciidoctor | A fast, open source text processor and publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc content to HTML5, DocBook, PDF, and other formats. https://asciidoctor.org/ asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf: Asciidoctor PDF: A native PDF converter for AsciiDoc based on Asciidoctor and Prawn, written entirely in Ruby: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf/#themes Asciidoctor Example https://jianmin.dev/asciidoctor-example/ Using AsciiDoc and Asciidoctor to write documentation - Tutorial https://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AsciiDoc/article.html Jean Take action in Free Software Foundation campaigns: https://www.fsf.org/campaigns In support of Richard M. Stallman https://stallmansupport.org/ _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
