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Comment by starquake | Hacker News Reader

Using closed source software to drive my OS doesn't sound that appealing to me.

Then don't buy it. Not everything in the world needs to be made free just for you.

Nah, this is a very good point; I've seen things similar to this in the past and it's a cool idea -- but "subscription modeling" every little tool is not a good path to keep going down.

Free and open source is important and it's perfectly fine to be critical here.

i bought it for like 4 bucks several months ago. for the price (and subscription tier) i'm seeing now, i wouldn't say it's worth it.

Demanding everything be free and open source is important if you don't want independent developers to be able to make a living, and instead wish to create a world where the vast majority of software is controlled by big tech, who are the benefactors of "free" software. The less you're willing to pay people making good software, the more territory predatory ad/tracking-fueled "free" software gets. The more territory you give them, the more they're going to buy out open source software to destroy. We see this happening more and more recently, with uv, bun, vite etc. being bought out - if they can't put food on the table, they will sell out to monopolists.

I agree that I would never pay a subscription fee for any kind of system functionality, but there is a lifetime purchase option available, so there is no grounds to critique that here. Having extra payments models available in addition to a regular purchase model does not make a product worse.

I made a very good living developing open source software for more than a decade. Nothing about open source software precludes one from making money, it's just a different business model from closed source.

A business model that supports a tiny fraction of the market. To the extent there is money in FOSS, even then most of it is provided by the funding of big tech (a whole host of some of the most widely-used FOSS, like Linux, LLVM, Go, Rust, C#, Typescript, VSCode, React, are all obviously corporate-backed). Independent developers who can make a living selling FOSS exist, but are absolutely on the fringe.

Yeah, but I didn't do that. I think I really did mean "little tool" here. This (likely) just isn't the right scale for a pay-to-play project. Obsidian kind of figured this out, but my gut is that this thing is too small.

If you don’t like their opinion, you don’t have to respond. Not every opinion you disagree with on the internet requires a response from you.

If you don't like my opinion, you don't have to respond. Yet you chose to anyways. Curious.

I didn’t say I didn’t like your opinion. Just responding in the same manner you treated someone else.

I push back against people criticising independent software for not being free because I believe it is deeply harmful for our industry. My initial reply didn't have much susbtance, but then neither did the comment I was replying to.

I’m confused because I don’t see anything about cost in the opinion you responded to.

You just don't get it. It's a critical system tool that's being discussed here. For someone serious about their privacy, it's a valid point. It's not open source nor is from a reputed enterprise. What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?

> What's preventing the developer from adding a key logger or so?

They can log my keys all they want, I would never give a program like this internet access because it has no valid reason to ever connect to the internet (after purchasing a lifetime license). If you're serious about your privacy surely you take a little bit of responsibility for not giving every program you run unfettered access to your system?

If you're on Linux, mouseless [0] may work well for you.

[0] https://github.com/jbensmann/mouseless

May not work with bluetooth keyboard (debian 13).

Yeah, feels kinda weird to think about using a mouse pointer utility with licensing DRM.

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