Anyone espousing the philosophy that software should be free because it already exists needs a reality check. I understand that there are zero marginal costs to deliver another copy of my app, but I have incurred, and continue to incur, a massive opportunity cost to develop my app. One I will likely never recoup. One that will have serious financial ramifications for the rest of my life.
So I don’t think of payments as royalties, I think of it as payment in arrears. And as long as I am the one bearing the up front cost and risk of development, then it is not out of line to expect payment.
Most developers won’t release free software because they know most users won’t pay for it. There are even free software developers who don’t want their app in F-Droid because they know most users won’t pay for it. Expecting free software to be free is not conducive to free software development.
Anyway, I’ll drop it. Variants of this conversation have been occurring for decades. I don’t actually expect to change anyones mind or expect the F-Droid maintainers to release a billing service. But if they did I would eagerly contribute to the development.
Well, there seem to be plenty enough people on F-Droid doing just that. I think that if they too got paid for their work, they would have little incentive to fork except on moral grounds (as per @MelodyConcerto).
As an aside, even abandonware usually still functions (since the FOSS world isn’t doing planned obsolescence). Often it’s good enough for the user. On my phone I have plenty of abandoned apps or apps I chose to downgrade because I didn’t like the new UI or something. For most apps this works for me, and I’m very grateful to the folks who ported these apps, even if they gave up maintaining after a couple versions.
Actually that is a reasonably good point. If we made F-Droid actually profitable easily; we’d be covered in SLEAZY FORKS in no time flat.
No; we need that barrier to prevent casual LQ forking causing the real devs from missing revenue… assuming they wanna be on F-Droid’s theoretical ‘NON-FREE’ repos and turn a profit with Anti-Features to create profit opportunity.
(Seems the software chose the wrong post to quote)
You misunderstand the meaning of non-free as well. Paywalls do not make software non-free, so they are allowed in the main F-Droid repo.
My voluntary donations worked out to $0.12 $0.62 for each hour that I worked on my app in August. Any sleaze is welcome to fork my app and redirect that money, so long as they also redirect support e-mails to their inbox.
I’m grateful for the users who voluntarily donate. But I know for a fact many thousands of F-Droid users use my app, and I can reasonably estimate that I receive one-time donations from less than 2% of them. And the majority of those one-time donations are for $1. Google Play users, on the other hand, subscribe at a 10% rate, and I earn more from one day of Google Play revenue than I earned in voluntary donations for the entire month of August. And no, my Google Play revenue is not supporting my family either, but it is trending in the right direction.
Nagging for donations is not a viable solution for supporting free software developers. It hasn’t been for decades, and it never will be. Tweaking the nag box is not going to magically open up users wallets. Anyone claiming that developers can be fairly compensated by voluntary donations is either an ideologue or terribly naive.
So how about an in-app purchase lib that is based on Liberapay and OpenCollective? That sounds like it would be quite nice. Ideally we’d make it compatible with Google Play, like it would also support Google’s in-app API and only offer that option if Google Play is installed on the device. I think microG has started coding a bit for an in-app purchases lib.
Two concrete takeaways from this thread for me are:
I don’t have any opinion on the implementation, the only thing that matters to me is that it be endorsed by F-Droid. I will happily fork over 30% of my revenue!
If this is something that you decide to pursue then I would be willing to make a meaningful contribution to any development effort, just DM me!
I’m personally buried in running projects at the moment, so my role in this specific one would have to be limited to helping to get approval from the core contributors and assisting in working through integration.
I guess the next step is someone sketching out an idea of how it would
work, then getting the core contributors to agree on it. I wonder if
Liberapay or OpenCollective has some kind of API to handle the “30% to
F-Droid” part.
For other ways of handling the revenue sharing, the hard part is that
F-Droid as an org is really not setup to handle money. It would require
quite a bit of revenue to get to the point where we could pay someone to
do the accounting. I could see this model being widely useful if we
actually got it going. For example, GNU/Linux distros could do
something similar, since they are also packaging third party software
for users.
