OpenCollective provides a way to publicly track expenses, so as we pay out from there, the expenses will be publicly visible. Ideally, someone would put the old F-Droid Limited reports in there so we have some kind of history of expeditures.
Just to provide some background, there are some apps on F-Droid that are many by companies who pay their developers to work on the apps and help get them into F-Droid. In that case, sponsoring the maintenance of the app in F-Droid makes sense. Those companies generally offer their apps on other app stores without payment. For developers that are aiming to earn money selling the app itself, e.g. like paid apps in Google Play or Faircode’s scheme, then this idea would be counter intuitive. This is all a discussion of business models.
I am a fellow developer (desktop applications) and have been enjoying F-Droid services for some time now.
If I had an app on F-Droid, I wouldn’t like to have to pay a fee. Donations doesn’t work, I know that very well. But as a user, I would gladly pay (reasonable) amount anually to use these services. And I am sure that a lots of people know that maintaining this kind of community effort is easier with some financial backup, so I think that I am not the only one with this sentiment.
@dejanst@ByteHamster In fact you agree to pay Google, Apple and not F-Droid! (please have some gratitudes guys!), “feed the penguin” (could be a good slogan) or “feed the droid”. As devs, our main goal is to deploy our apps on a lot of devices, not necessarily to become rich My proposition of a fee was to pay the infra (electricity cost, builds, servers, upgrades…) and some developers who create the packages, not the devs coming with their source codes LOL. BUT this could be an option too. Of course Google provides infos like the number of installations/uninstallations, countries, devices. This kind of report should be developed.
not a lot of people will pay. Some people live with less than 1 euro a day. (And I understand). F-Droid service should be free for the users. But if some want to pay they can also buy mugs…
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough - I am not Android dev and I don’t pay Google nor Apple.
What I meant to say was that there must be some people willing to pay for service (exactly what you said).
I also agree that not many would pay, and I also didn’t think it should be mandatory. I can buy a mug, sure, but having some kind of system might be of greater help to “the cause”
TLDR: If F-Droid decide devs should pay - fine. Donations do not work, though. But users (which is my only role here) could help, too.
@hotlittlewhitedog Increasing my install base is not my goal if the only thing I get out of it is an increased support load. I’m not expecting to get rich, but I am spending an incredible amount of time and effort trying to offer a competitive alternative to proprietary apps, and I hope to some day earn a living off of it.
We lost our privacy in part because most people don’t care and aren’t willing to pay for it. I don’t think privacy should only be afforded to those who can pay for it, but I would imagine most F-Droid users can pay for it, so we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I don’t know how large my F-Droid install base is, but they account for 40% of token usage for a third party service so I can make a reasonable estimate. And here is a comparison of my revenue for a recent time period: 241 one-time donations outside of the Play Store versus 1324 new Google Play subscriptions. Many of these subscriptions are going to provide revenue for years to come, but in 5+ years maybe four people have ever sent me a second donation.
My assumption now is that @hans is referring to developers providing free FOSS apps to access their paid services. These developers absolutely should not be freeloading off of F-Droid. But I’d be surprised if there was a large pool of paid service developers that could be nagged for the earn-a-living-working-on-fdroid type of money that was mentioned.
If F-Droid provided some kind of billing service it would attract new high quality apps, increase developer buy-in, and would be hugely beneficial to FOSS and the F-Droid ecosystem. And a 30% cut would provide a steady, sustainable revenue stream for F-Droid.
This is a horrible idea. Currently F-Droid is difficult enough to submit to; without adding a financial burden. Until we solve this problem; I see no reason for us to be requesting donations.
I also oppose baking in support for any kind of IAP/Monetization platforms. Leave that to the developer to implement and slap them with an Anti-Feature tag if they abuse it. F-Droid is for FREE SOFTWARE. It is not FREE if you have to pay to unlock it; it has an entirely different license; one often incompatible with the one(s) we usually require apps on F-Droid to have.
So no. Developers shouldn’t be allowed to charge too much money for apps here. I tolerate premium versions that you can buy binaries of directly from the developer and ads for such a business model in the app itself. That at least doesn’t get interfered with much. F-Droid doesn’t need to take a cut.
You can’t have truly free speech if it’s fettered by the likes of licenses, copyright and patents.
Free software MUST BE FREE. As in Beer. It isn’t properly free speech otherwise; because of the obligation to respect certain rights. Copyleft, not Copyright.
Nowhere in the text of any free/libre software license is there a clause requiring free software be offered free of charge. If you have the legal right to download the source code and do whatever you want with it, including disabling the payment requirement, then it is free/libre software. Other people have downloaded my code, inserted advertisements, and republished it on the Play Store. A free software license granted them the freedom to do that.
Like I mentioned before, over five years of voluntary donations combined is less than my Google Play payout last month. I have a wife and three small children to provide for, I can’t give my time away for free. Most users don’t care if software is free/libre or not. If the ones that do care aren’t willing to support me, what incentive do I have to release my work under a free software license?
The goal of the free software movement is to make all software free/libre. Requiring free/libre software be given away for free is self-defeating. By pricing developers time at nothing you discourage them from considering free software licenses. The only way to normalize free software is to make it just as lucrative as proprietary software. Relying on corporate benefactors, grants, and altruistic developers is not sustainable and will only ensure that free software remain a fringe movement forever.
I think the devs that submit to fdroid are already doing a great effort. They will go away and we lose (not loose) apps. When apps are not there the average user will be made/forced to use proprietary apps. Please do not.
I would suggest that you can put a small banner in fdroid app TOP/bottom with text like:
Fdroid needs every month
EUR ABC for server
EUR XYZ for bandwidth
EUR PQR for maintenance by X persons’ salary.
Donate to use to keep this free for everyone. Link to fdroid payment page/ bank or liberapay or whatever here.
The problem to monetizing FOSS apps is introduced by this fact:
If F-Droid introduces paid apps, there’s nothing stopping people from creating a fork, call it “F-Beer-Droid”, which takes F-Droid apps’ source code, removes payment requirements and recompiles them.
Yeah I’m sure that would happen. But if you provide an easy to use payment service that supports both F-Droid and app developers with one payment, and you make users go out of their way to not pay, most will likely choose to pay. And those who can’t, or won’t, have the option of adding the third-party repo.
This is why I feel that Free/Libre software should not seek to make a profit. Because the minute you seek to do so; you usually end up being forced to close or relicense the source to something or obfuscate code. I don’t object to asking for donations; but requiring it to unlock some function is by nature making a profit.
The motivation for profit breaks copyleft nature of FREE Software.
You misunderstand free software licensing. Copyleft and permissive licenses have nothing to do with profit motive, paywalls, or DRM. They have to do with your rights to use the source code.
Developers can already choose to close a previously open project. Most developers choose not to release their source code in the first place. Offering a payment service will lead to more developers releasing apps under free software licenses, which leads to more free/libre software.
Talking about comparative values of time is a sensitive topic… but that’s a great connection. It’s worth taking a step back and asking why software writer-developers think they should receive payment more than once for their hours of labor, and other costs, on “making a piece” of software. Or, why shouldn’t farm laborers receive a stream of royalty payments for every kernel of corn they make and sell. Software licensing (like “intellectual capital”) is a recent invention to put artificial, non-natural constraints on what people can do with digital information after it’s out in the wild. In absence of that and other trickery to prevent it, almost everyone would freely copy and share without a care.
@throwaway5251
goal of the free software movement
pricing developers time at nothing
Unfortunately the “movement” is a bunch of disjointed efforts pushing in different directions, with some overlap. The copyleft/licensing approach is a way of going along with the licensing regime, while trying to use it to push people into releasing source code, etc. Other ways could include boycotting software that doesn’t come with sources, or refusing to run anything other than scripted software. But you have to get enough people pushing together to make it happen… So, it’s amazing there is as much free/open source software available as there is.
I don’t price the time actually spent working at nothing, but I do question paying for time spent not actually working, or time waiting for royalties to come in.
Some people are willing to pay money for services like email, calendar, and file storage, even while the same services are available gratis in exchange for privacy and advertising. F-droid could try charging for their services too. Have different pricing tiers for different classes of customers (users, developers, poor users, poor developers, whatever), like gitlab, etc.
@zolidor yes, you can just fork and remove the payment and free the features, eg. Fairemail got a fork named… Simple Email…great…well except the part where it’s 2 years old already…forking is not free either apparently, you suddenly become a free software dev yourself…you need to support your app, fix bugs (the original dev won’t fix yours), keep up to date with upstream… It’s a lot of unpaid work, ironically…
(please have some gratitudes guys!), “feed the penguin” (could be a good slogan) or “feed the droid”. As devs, our main goal is to deploy our apps on a lot of devices, not necessarily to become rich 
My proposition of a fee was to pay the infra (electricity cost, builds, servers, upgrades…) and some developers who create the packages, not the devs coming with their source codes LOL. BUT this could be an option too. Of course Google provides infos like the number of installations/uninstallations, countries, devices. This kind of report should be developed.