MudMan

Yeah, for sure. I'm just wary that the line between cynicism and defeatism is thin, and defeatism leads to conformism.

If the system relies on integrity, it will fail. If it relies on shame or moral obligation it will fail. There is a reason on the other side of the fence they couldn't root out piracy until they started providing more convenient (but more expensive) alternatives. If you rely on people feeling "obligated" to pay, they either won't pay anyway or won't use the software. That's not a viable option.

So you're left with the other option. Whether one agrees that FOSS is "broken" or not, the only way to make the system sustainable is... well, to make it sustainable. If that means enacting political change, then that's where the effort should go.

It's not a strawman argument. My response (which wasn't to you) was triggered by the notion that we "need to normalize paying for foss". I don't think that's true, and I do think it'd lead to generating a "tipping system". Plus, again, not what the linked article is driving at.

I'm also not fond of "we live in a system" as an argument for playing by the system's rules. I mean, by that metric people should just charge for access and call it a day, that's what the "system" is encouraging. We need sustainable flows of income towards FOSS, but that doesn't mean step one is normalizing end users feeling obligated to pay.

We absolutely must financially incentivize software developers. But charity is not a substitute for financing in a healthy system. The sources of financing can't rely on badgering individuals to feel guilty for using resources in the public domain (or at least publicly available) without a voluntary contributions. I agree with the OP and the article in that the support system shouldn't be charity. Tax evaders, redistribute wealth, provide public contributions to FOSS. We should create a sysem where FOSS is sustainable, not held up by tips like a service job in an anarchocapitalist hellscape.

No, it's not, and it's not the argument the article is making. The article is arguing for developers receiving public supoprt financed by taxing corporation who are currently evading massive amounts of money.

This is not a case of "no one", anyway. Throw a coffee if you can is already how this works. And it's not just "a coffee", plenty of openly available software has alternate revenue streams, support from corporate backers and other sustainability tools besides voluntary crowdsourcing. The OP is pondering a systemic solution, not a moral obligation based on capitalist conceptions of how much time is worth and charity.

I hate this argument so, so passionately.

It's the argument you hear from anarchocapitalists trying to argue that there are hidden costs to the res publica and thus it should be dismantled. Yes, we all have a finite amount of time. Yes, we can all quantify the cost of every single thing we do. That is a terrible way to look at things, though. There are things that are publicly available or owned by the public or in the public domain, and those things serve a purpose.

So yeah, absolutely, if you can afford it support people who develop open software. Developing open software is absolutely a job that many people have and they do pay the bills with it. You may be able to help crowdfund it if you want to contribute and can't do it any other way (or hey, maybe it's already funded by corporate money, that's also a thing). But no, you're not a freeloader for using a thing that is publicly available while it's publicly available. That's some late stage capitalism crap.

Which, in fairness, the article linked here does acknowledge and it's coming from absolutely the right place. I absolutely agree that if you want to improve the state of people contributing to publicly available things, be it health care or software, you start by ensuring you redistribute the wealth of those who don't contirbute to the public domain and profit disproportionately. I don't know if that looks like UBI or not, but still, redistribution. And, again, that you can absolutely donate if you can afford it. I actually find the thought experiment of calculating the cost interesting, the extrapolation that it's owed not so much.

UVW’s account was suspended in December and deleted in early January. The platform ignored multiple requests to restore the union’s account. UVW is back on Twitter with the same username.

Two notes here:

One: I'm screaming into a pillow.

Two: Never let anybody tell you that left unchecked, competition will always land on the optimal outcome for a market.

I agree that dev to user is best, and I agree that the current greenlight processes for game publishers are pretty busted, no arguments there. I also have bigger issues with the sub model he's not even mentioning.

In fairness, though, I think for majors with that busted greenlight process the sub model does enable some games to get made that wouldn't otherwise. Some games just don't work at full price and just can't stack up to the major productions but they do get checked out in a sub. For smaller games and devs the sub money can guarantee survival.

But that doesn't take away that a subscription-dominated market is poorer, the preservation issues or any of the other problems with that being the primary thrust. Tech guys tend to be all-in on things and think they should be THE way because more money is more optimal and if they dominate then that's more money. In reality for a content ecosystem to thrive a multi-window ecosystem is probably best. Also, I want to buy games I can own, and the less they let me do that the more I want it, so... there's that.

I'm not sure if you read my comment backwards or you're just agreeing with it?

Anyway, yeah, I think hte big problem gaming subs have is that unless you have first party ownership over every game in existence you can't do the Netflix thing of pretending to be selling the only expense you're ever gonna need. The way games work you engage with them too long and they cycle around too fast, so even if there is a big pool of games they offer it's just a big fat pit of FOMO and feeling bad for seeing that game you're mildly interested in come and go without actually having played it. I already have a stressful backlog without adding the pain point of monetizing my not getting around to all the games I'd like to play.

Kinda. This is the exact opposite of that, in that they control the IP and went out to find an external dev with lots of subject matter expertise to make it.

On paper I'd say that's better than them buying Relic off of Sega, but then Sega fired a bunch of people at Relic this year, like everybody else, so what would have been better is very much up for debate.

I'm not sure who "they" is in this scenario. If it's Microsoft Games Studios... well, yeah, they're a publisher. You just described what a publisher is.

I think if we're talking about their recent publishing strategy they've certainly been on a bit of a rut. There's still some interesting stuff happening with their IP. They got Relic to make a surprsiingly faithful Age of Empires, people do like Microsoft Flight Sim, that type of thing. But still, yeah, they've made a lot of purchases and we haven't seen new games coming out from most of those to justify those purchases, which does speak to a bit of a struggle to find a direction. That Hellblade sequel looks intriguing, but for a publisher with a lot of fully owned studios that has been fighting claims of monopolistic practices for their high profile acquisitions their output from that stable hasn't picked up pace yet.

I get it, games take forever to make now. That Hellblade game has been marketed for as long as the Xbox Series has, and that came out in 2020. Still, that itself is a problem. If the big oil tanker is hard to steer you have to plan your turns before you get to the icebergs. I do genuinely hope they get it together, though. That's a lot of talent, IP and potential to let run on idle for too long. Or worse, to fail in the context of a major corporation and stop getting support.