Please forgive me for adding on when I didn't make time to read the whole discussion. I saw that this is about concerns around funding for free software.
I want to emphasize that funding is a BIG issue. If we could *sabotage* the funding or otherwise existence of proprietary software, it might be less. See, IRC exists, XMPP too, etc. And everyone could be at least functional using them. But they lose potential users because Slack and other proprietary stuff has both some nice features and a strong marketing budget. If we could *eliminate* the proprietary competition, not only would the free software options get more use, they probably would also get more funding. But in practice, we have to better out-compete the proprietary competition. That's been the issue since the earliest pre-GNU days of RMS working to reverse engineer proprietary software to keep people from moving to it. It helps that we have the freedom-selling-point but that's not enough on its own for most people, unfortunately. It's simply easier sell if we also compete on features and usability. To out-compete, we need funding. And it's not merely whether free software wins. We *also* want it to be better and to be as user-friendly as possible. Now, when people get into HOW to get funding, I see a lot of repeated ideas that aren't that effective (e.g. bounties or shaming of users for not donating). I'm involved in building a better solution at https://snowdrift.coop/ and we're a fully free software project ourselves, though we're building for people to use the platform rather than as intending for self-hosting. Anyway, we also have described the history, dilemmas, and issues at wiki.snowdrift.coop and we invite anyone who wants to see better funding for free software to volunteer to help us get fully launched. Cheers, Aaron Wolf co-founder, Snowdrift.coop _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
