The long wait is over, Ganymede has arrived
endeavouros.com
endeavouros.com
It’s not “the world economy depends on this stuff why is it not properly funded” (which is true) it’s “never before has a coupe of guys or girls in a garage been able to reach so many people, and stand a chance of getting funding”
The troubles people have finding ways to make a living whilst providing value to people suggests something is wrong not with them but the economy
If whatever OSS is too obscure to be noticed by non-techies but still fundamental (think OpenSSL, libxz,etc) it's more likely to lead to burnout far before anyone wants to put in any sane money (curl is one of few counter-examples but that hasn't had a straight journey).
If you're making entertainment, I think Patreon is awesome.
If you're making OSS... I'm not sure we have a good system. Buy Me A Coffee or a TipJar... Starring a repository... They're good... but they're not enough.
Upvoting on Hacker News whenever I see something promising is another thing I do that I hope might help...
I kind of wish I could subscribe to some monthly payment that tracked my usage of OSS, and sent each a fraction of the money, and that they appraised which systems they depended on, so it flowed down to them, too, and etc...
It's up for the community to adopt those platforms for their project
It's all psychological. If curl had a micropayment system and every time you used it, it cost a 10th of a penny and there's a monthly subscription. Oh God, holy hell, no! But at the same time, I don't want Daniel Stenberg to go hungry.
Say, I pay $10 a month. It figures out I used curl 850 times. I used gunzip 1246 times. And etc.
It may turn out that I'm donating a 10th of a penny to curl every time I use it.
Do I want to commit to donating a 10th of a penny BEFORE I can use curl each time?
No.
But if I set a flat rate of donating to OSS - $10 a month - and there were a simple tool that figured out a semi-reasonable way to allocate that money... I think that'd be neat.
Like, "Steam for Donating to OSS."
app usage / all tracked app usage --> donation to app.
Handling the payments portion would be... nightmarish?
With crypto it would be really easy. I'd be tempted to take cash on the frontend, convert to crypto, split, then reconvert to cash and make payouts.
How do we handle registering apps that you use? What about upstream dependencies? Example: you just spun up a new React project, do we target all deps on that project? Is this only for command line? What about cron jobs, or systemd? Or that systemd service script you copied from a gist somewhere?
At the end of the month, I'm told to donate my entire $10 to some obscure tool I've never even heard of.
The system did all of the tracking, across all users, and then figured out how to assign users like me to projects, such that I'm only donating once or twice ($6 to this project, and $4 to that project.)
The system I propose does all of the counting, all of the aggregating, matching intended donations to the recipients, and then encourages me to do my actual gifting...
Seems possible, but weird. Or maybe we need to set up a non-profit to do all this money laundering^W^W donating.
We should have a system whereby you don't die of pneumonia homeless on the street if you don't have a job. The things OSS developers do for free are of value completely incomparable with what almost all of us do in our day jobs.
People should be free to make art and music and anything else they want. People should be free to contribute to our culture and society.
Alas, someone wants to take 99% of the value of your work for themselves and give you only the barest minimum they can get away with. And if you don't comply, you don't deserve to live.
I've been waiting a long time for us to explore the moon.
I haven't been waiting for an Arch distro to release... whatever this is.
- the front page of the site
I know that's a cheesy way to say it's an Arch distro but I hope you notice how poor the phrasing is for someone trying to understand what they've been linked to.
I know I'm young enough to be too young to complain about getting old, but I still feel like I'm getting old every so often.
I think that's sensible but from a user perspective it's also why I think these nth degree derivatives are pointless. So much infrastructure and maintenance to effectively ship arch with a wallpaper.
Many of these projects eventually go the way of the dodo, I believe this is in itself a successor to Antergos. Just install Arch, Debian or Fedora and take 10 minutes to configure the desktop. The biggest issue with arch was the setup but they ship a TUI install script now that anyone can use. The OS on your computer shouldn't be a hobby project.
If OSS developers can build and maintain essentially all of our digital infrastructure in the time between "work", then what would happen if we gave them all the time they want? What would happen if every developer had the freedom to build up and improve the things our entire society rest upon?
What does software look like when motivated exclusively by profit? You get Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Qualcomm.
What does software look like when it's developed out of passion purely for the improvement to the world? Curl, linux, git.
Funding OSS developers is entirely backwards. It's trying to insert a profit incentive where it should not exist.
hn should be a place where you can post niche things, and come to the comments or click through if you are out of the loop.
This release may not be giant compared to the last release, but its the first ISO refresh in a while. So its two different "upgrades."
amazing distro.
[1] after it messed up my linux dual boot config, continuously reset my registry tweaks with forced updates / restarts, insisted on re-enabling the io-destroying Defender, and started force-feeding me ads