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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

They clearly would like donations, but choose not to require any payments.

Your line of reasoning seems to be along the lines of "anything not forbidden is compulsory" which is not a good place. Having the choice to donate but not being required to is good.

And yes, I think that if OpenAI is choosing to include an entire copy of LibreOffice in their product, it is definitely the right thing to do to sling them a donation. Note that the moral thing to do is not always the required thing to do, or even the legal thing to do.

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"It's the right thing to do" in reply to a moral query is the "begging the question fallacy".

The question at hand is of the form: Is it right to do X (to donate, in this case)? Your reply amounts to: yes, because X is the right thing to do. This merely restates the query as its own conclusion.

"Donations" are - by definition - entirely voluntary.

If people want to donate, that's fine. If they don't want to donate -- also fine. That's what "donation" means.

Therefore anyone's decision not to donate is entirely consistent with the author's own expressed preferences.

Whether an actor happens to be large and rich (OpenAI) is irrelevant. The license -- the author's formally expressed preferences -- does not say anything about "free unless you are rich." They could certainly have done so if they had wanted to. They didn't. You are taking it upon yourself to claim that you know what's best for them.

More like, don't expect anything if not forced. Most people only generally pay for things if there is no other option. It's about what's moral (even then debatable as everyone has different morals) versus what's realistic to expect.

The Guardian's funding model [0] proves this wrong.

People will absolutely pay for things voluntarily if you ask them, without forcing them to.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/nov/12/katharine...

In a nutshell - voluntary funding by readership. No paywall. You can read as many stories as you like for free, and donate if you want. It works.

I've always wondered how they are actually making ends meet, if at all, that is, what their budget looks like.-

That article has no detail. How much did they make? They said they hope to break even in 2019 so they weren't profitable, what are the latest stats? Compare this to NYTimes which has been crushing it after implementing their paywalled subscription.

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