I feel like many open source users are tech savvy people, many of who work in tech and/or have good jobs and a high disposable income, and are using open source not because it’s free but out of a certain idealism. They would be happy to support open source software development but never get around to really going to the website of the project and donating for each thing they use.
So imagine this:
opens F-Droid
split screen with choice:
Use OSS for free, no strings attached
Pay a little to support the open source software you use
and next screen if you choose the second option:
Choose monthly payment and divide it between the open source software I use
Pay fixed amount per app
Ask how much I want to pay for each app (on install)
Ask how much I want to pay after using an app for one month
(all options would be monthly amounts) (f-droid would be treated exactly as the other apps)
So a more of an (optional) subscription based model similar to other stuff these days, you know, netflix, spotify, office 365 etc. People are used to that now and I think a subset of open source users would be open to it.
You choose to donate 10 or 100 dollars/euro a month and never look back. F-droid does the rest. It divides the money between the apps that you actually have downloaded through F-Droid.
And it should not be that difficult to implement, there are so many payment providers with an easy API out there.
Could be the start of a sustainable open source business model, or at least put a few dollars in the pockets of open source developers, including yourself.
So we should track all users and their apps? Track which apps they use for how long so we know % of money based on time? Yeah… so… how is F-Droid different from Play exactly?
Just use the Donate option for the apps you use and love… easier…
/LE: not to mention, banking issues, PII from payers, card management. etc etc etc brrr terrible
Track which apps they use for how long so we know % of money based on time?
Only track which apps are installed, which the app does already. But yeah it would have to report that back to a server, true. But remember that it’s optional and with the user’s explicit permission. Tracking usage time might be more ‘fair’ but also more difficult and privacy invasive.
how is F-Droid different from Play exactly?
People who develop FOSS that respects privacy would get paid instead of commercial companies that develop proprietary software that mines your data.
Just use the Donate option for the apps you use and love… easier…
How is it easier to figure out how to pay for the 20 or so apps that I use individually, and make a separate decision about that each time? and if it’s for a monthly recurring donation to keep track of all those? And many OSS apps don’t prompt you for it so only those people that go out of their way to find it are doing it
/LE: not to mention, banking issues, PII from payers, card management. etc etc etc brrr terrible
Which now each project has to do separately, costing a lot more time in total. Plus payment providers handle a lot of that. Every mom and pop webshop manages to do it.
To clarify and improve my points and make it easier to read? Sorry bad habit but just trying to put my idea in the best light since I think it’s a good idea. Thanks for fixing.
Are you suggesting “tech savvy people” as you call them are incapable of keeping track of the apps they have installed and paying appropriately? Or could they just be too lazy?
Just too lazy. Same as the rest of the world. If you call it ‘lazy’ that is, if next to their job and their family and their sports and their grocery shopping and their cooking they prefer to hit the couch and binge watch some tv series instead of doing administrative work for the dozens of charities they support. I prefer to call it human.
I get from your hostile tone that you are probably the pinnacle of self-discipline and you are doing all that and more just because a man with your moral fortitude could do nothing else, but if you take a breath and look critically at the world for a moment then you know that if you want people to make a certain choice on average more often, you have to make it easy for them. I think that for a significant part of the people that support open source software the limiting factor in their contribution is not their finances, but the time and the mental energy it takes to have to make another 100 decisions. Read up on choice stress also.
One of my main issues for being able to upgrade on Simple App was after clicking all the prompts to upgrade, create account, and pay, I got lost somewhere in all of it and said “F it; I’ll just use the free version” all though I always wanted to support.
Now I just make my monthly donation to F-Droid and wish for the best. Am I good boy for that?
No. But I have a blue collar job, little spare time, and even less social life; so if anyone of you Android Dev Brainiacs can keep all the things you mentioned out of some kind of pay “app” for us laymen to use, that would be .
No, I don’t believe that F-Droid should be involved in payments at all. If you want to pay a developer, you go directly to their site or their get or source page and you find out how to donate to them. If they can accept donations at all, and if they want to accept donations at all, they’re not shy about putting that information where you can find it. I don’t want F-Droid to become a financial exchange in any way.
Btw, when looking at the ancient simple mobile apps in F-Droid/archive you still get the option buy the developer a coffee. I hope the developer now has enough coffee from the company he sold his Apps?
Does anyone ever check whether those links still work after an app hasn’t been updated for a couple of years?
.
, Dev’s know best I suppose.