I know some of you have gone complies FOSS, but I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical. So what are your favorite non-foss apps?
Steam. It is one of the few company’s that still has principles
Yeah. Not being legally required to abandon principles in favor of short-term profits for shareholders is tight.
I fear the day Gaben isn’t around anymore. Hopefully there is a succession plan for the company to be handed over to someone with similar values.
Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as “it” by her manager.
It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.
I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that’s always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token “competitors” that they completely control to exist.
Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:
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EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)
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Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)
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Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren’t steam)
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GOG (storefront only, I’m pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)
Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don’t have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.
Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I’m not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your “ownership” of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.
If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn’t really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.
???
I think you’ve got a bit of a misconception about FOSS software - you’re allowed to make money selling it, you just also have to provide the source code to any customers! A fair few FOSS apps have free versions on F-Droid but paid versions on the Play store, for example.
Simple Mobile Tools (Simple Contacts etc.) cost money for the full version on Play but you can get it for free on F-Droid or GitHub!
The Showly on F-Droid is not the same as the one on the play store, it says in its description it is a fork.
The play store description says its open source and will be on F-droid soon but I actually did not see it there.
Steam.
A linux client that works, and actually gets fixes, improvements, and features, that is a lot.
Davinci Resolve
Really good video editor, and also, has Linux client.
I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.
Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn’t have a problem with that.
Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.
On a bigger scale (although they’re not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.
