Re: Question for the Candidates: Donations to application developers?

[Oliver Propst <oliver propst gmail com>]

On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 22:03 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> Hi, perhaps a little late to the party here but I thought I'd ask
> anyway. One of the most frequent enhancements people suggest to
> gnome-software is the ability to donate to both upstream applications,
> and to independent developers. This is something I think we need to
> address if we want random developers to actually write applications
> for GNOME. Allan suggested something GNOME-specific without too much
> detail but a lot of people have suggested something like a
> GNOME-themed Flattr page, which only really works for GNOME
> applications and means we rely on a non-free-software service (albeit
> one that's solved a lot of legal problems). There are a plethora of
> legal (do we allow refunds?), ethical (should we be encouraging users
> to pay for free software?) and other issues, and it would be
> interesting to hear what candidates have to say about this.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Richard.
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I understand of course that implementing working a solution is not a
trivial thing and have many challenges but for me that is to large
degree what GNOME are about, find free software solutions to hard
problems.

I see this as yet another area where GNOME can pioneer and advance free
software.

Selling free software is as probably most of you who are following this
list are nothing new. RMS sold copies of emacs on discs (complete with
source code of course) in the 80’s [2] and before RedHat switched to a
subscription model for its operating system, the main revenue for the
company was selling Linux operating systems in a CD-box [3].

I think that in the last years with the introduction of the different
appstores many people are today happy to pay for good quality software
[4], especially if its a small price, some people even think that gratis
software equals bad quality.

I do not think its realistic long-term in today’s market to have a
platform and not offer developers a way of monazite app development.  

I don’t expect this to be an easy journey, there will sure be bumps in
the road but I think the longer we wait with implementing a solution the
more we distance ourselves from the general developer community.

1 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708269
2 Free Software, Free Society, 2nd  by Richard Stallman, page 12 for
reference 
3 http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/09/23/red_hat_q2_revenue_up/
4http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/smartphone-owners-willing-to-pay-for-apps/#!beZgiz

I know the election are over, but did not see this until now and wanted
to clearly state my opinion on this topic.

-- 
-mvh Oliver Propst