Please Support Open Source Projects
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2012-11-28 16:18:33 00:00
Today while reading my daily dose of Internet articles I arrived to this post of my friend Raphael.
We managed to fund the translation and the liberation of the book with the initial campaign but now we must ensure that sales of printed copies and donations cover for the time we’re going to spend in the next few months to update the book.
And this is indeed a concern because while the volume of sales and donations has been significant during the first 2-3 months after the liberation, it quickly dried up and we’re now down to about 100 EUR of revenues per month for each of Roland and I.
The fact that individuals like Raphael are trying to live from Open Source projects is something great, because if the succeed with that effort, the quality of Open Source projects and products is going to improve a lot. And I am not saying there is not quality already, but the more the better, right?.
I have another example, Uberwriter, which is a good Markdown editor for Ubuntu, which is also an Open Source project, is being sold by 5 dollars, which is a good price for a good and polished piece of software.
Creating good products like those cited above, demand a lot of time, and the people doing them need to eat too.
What is concerning about all of this, is that it seems that most of us think that all Free (as in freedom) software needs to be Free (as in beer -gratis-). We need to change our minds, and start contributing with money.
Even one dollar is a good contribution, we are thousands of people using this stuff, for free, for years!.
So, please consider supporting one or two of your favorites projects. On my side, I'm installing Ubuntu, just to buy Uberwriter, and I have contributed a little with Ubuntu at the time of downloading it. And I have already made my very small contribution to the Debian Handbook.
