This is why on principle I almost 99.99% refuse to invest time or money in any app or service that is an ongoing cost that can be taken away or enshittified.
It needs to not collect data, have a single purchase (or yearly feature update subscriptions that don’t affect the underlying functionality that is permanently available to me as a user) and if there’s any doubt about that I’m looking for the next, more permanent solution + negative review for enshittifiers
KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?
I can handle that.
- its a donation
- its a presumably good product I want to continue to be funded and developed
- once a year
What if it weren’t a donation? What if the situation were a once annual subscription where your use of the software is reliant on that subscription cost?
Yes, I realize KDE is still open source, but what if they did this anyways?
Then thats a no. I’m not getting anything embedded in my workflow that can randomly decide it can’t work because the mother-ship is down or the business model needs to change.
Edit: all software business models in general need to embrace this. Charge more if ya have to or provide the essential features initially and then use nice-to-haves as the gain-winners going forward. Thats really how it should be with everything
If it is not open source, and you are not paying, someone else is and you are the product.
Bonus: You could be paying and be the product anyway.
Couldn’t be arsed to read this, fed the link into an LMM and asked to summarize. This is the result:
Dave Lane’s blog post, “Why ‘free’ proprietary software will always end in tears,” discusses the pitfalls of using proprietary software that is offered for free. He shares a personal story about a scouting group’s experience with a poorly implemented proprietary system and explains how such software often becomes a critical dependency for organizations. This dependency can lead to issues when the software’s limitations or costs become apparent. Lane argues that proprietary software, even when free, often leads to negative outcomes due to its restrictive nature and the control exerted by its developers
