In a world where open source didn't exist? Well I paid €129 for Windows 10 Pro recently, if there was no open source *nix I guess I'd pay that for one.
If we consider this statistic to be meaningful in this case, then 97% of people don't care. That's enough to be able to generalize.
> What I really fail to understand is why people don't hedge. They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product, but never realize they can help fund an open alternative for a much lower cost, and that once the product does what they want, they won't lose access to it?
Discord is not a paid application. I've never paid them a cent in my years of using it.
Since Ubuntu is arguably the most proprietary-software-friendly distro and also the most popular, I'd say a good portion of those 3% seem to be on Linux for the same reasons as me, and not for its "licensing status".
How much would you pay for Ubuntu if it was proprietary?
We don't know how much of that 3% is there for the FOSS aspect.
I suspect most are because of the free aspect and being better than Windows for their use case, the open source is just a bonus.
> They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product
People love free stuff and will prefer it if its good enough, that's why Discord and Google Docs are so popular.
Funding open source would be cool though. Specially if we started hiring UX people
> Funding open source would be cool though. Specially if we started hiring UX people
If I hadn't promised my wife that I would take a real break during the holidays, I'd be working on the landing page to gauge interest on this idea that I have on to create a (non-crypto) "DAO" for curating/funding/promoting Open Source development. Can I ping you once I have something more concrete to show?
I switched to Linux this year, after three decades as a happy Windows power user since 3.1, because I was finally sick of having to fight the OS to stop it from showing me ads, tracking my activity, and trying to push unwanted products and updates on me.
This may or may not count as "I switched for the FOSS". Of course its FOSS nature is ultimately the reason why Linux does not treat me as a data cow.
But if Linux were a fully closed-source, commercial OS, but still showed the same basic respect to me that older Windows version did, I would still be a happy user. Said respect need be as little as (1) don't put stuff on my machine without my permission, (2) let me do whatever the fuck I want on my machine.
No, I use Linux because I need a *nix system, Linux provides a better one out-of-the-box, and I very much dislike Apple's UI/UX.
That said, there were more than a few occasions that made me aware that this choice was not free of downsides:
- When I gave up on having a reliable bluetooth connection
- When I got so sick of looking for ways to improve battery life and just started assuming that it will last a third of what is claimed to last with Windows.
- After I tried to connect my guitar to my computer via an usb interface and realized that I had to choose between running the sound effects application or running any other sound app that depended on Pulseaudio.
- When I browsed through Steam and realized that I still can not find a good car-racing game that runs on Linux.
So, yes, Linux is great and can do a lot. But if you are not having any kind of periodic frustration with it you are either resignated or playing within a very small sandbox.
Please avoid putting words in my mouth, particularly when you are blatently wrong.
"Have you?" doesn't make sense, as we're not in that reality.
Imho, the question about donation comes across as implying the person is dishonest about being willing to pay if it was proprietary, unless they have donated when it's free.
But it's perfectly consistent for a person to be willing to pay for something if it has a price and happy to take it for free when it's offered for free.
Someone that says "I would pay if it were not free" is a much weaker signal that says "I paid even knowing I could have it for free"
Problem is, there's no way to have a price tag on it and have all else be the same. The reduction in users this would bring would impact many of the reasons I like Arch, not to mention the perverse incentives it creates for the maintainers.