I’m having to register to Lemmy directly now, when I’m used to posting from KBin’s instance. But now the errors is getting so bothersome that I can’t even surf around currently on it. The 50x error comes up after everytime I post somewhere, like make a thread.
The current admin is dealing with issues at the moment and can’t always be there, which is unfortunate because it sets up KBin and it’s magazines to be contaminated with bots, spam and other problems.
Speaking as someone who just received a grant from NLNet: I’m glad such a thing exists and I’m grateful for the funds I’m getting which will allow me to pay my bills for a couple of months. But if you told me 5 years ago (when I started working on Communick) that to make a living as a software developer I’d have to depend on the whims of bureaucrats who are playing with money that is not their own, I’d just go apply to Google or go back to my Big Corp.
Centralized economies do not work. Like everything else in the world, the best measure we have to determine if software is “good” is by putting a price on it and seeing how much people want to pay for it.
Also, it’s important to point out that this does not mean that we need VC, big corporate structure or any corrupt institution to work. There are indie devs making a killing (50/70/100k€ per month) on their own because they are building something that is valuable and are not shy from charging what they know what their work is worth.
Thats valuable insight. Thank you.
I‘d like to point out that the bureucrats are a different problem we need go get rid of as well. It does not mean the idea of publicly funding this stuff is bad. I think the reason why bureaucracy takes over is lack of public oversight and influence by the people.
If you take sidestreets of law (ie bancruptcy law in some countries) you will find yourself in the wild west because only a small fraction of people ever has to take this road. The people in charge behave like warlords because normal people dont know and care.
But yes, people should dual license their shit so that corpos have to pay for it.
If you want the government to be the one financing FOSS developement, who will be in charging of managing the purse if not the bureaucrats?
Strongly disagree. If you start putting restrictions around who should have the right to Free Software, it is no longer free. It is because of shitty “source available” mentality that I, as an small indie shop, can not offer hosting for interesting solutions for other companies. If Lemmy or Mastodon were not AGPL, I would never had touched it.
there is a big difference between them holding onto the purse and them being able to put walls of paper in front of anyone trying to access it. The more transparent and voted over publicly that is, the more it should actually function.
Help me here. My understanding is that you can dual license something, for example agpl (not ever to be taken closed source) and a pay for it if you want to build something proprietary with it, no? Let me know what real world example would spell doom here.
Maybe I misunderstood you. I thought you were calling for licenses that force companies to pay. Dual licensing is indeed an option if a company wants to pay to use free software in a closed product.
Re: bureaucracy. If you have any thoughts on how to get a public-funded system that can allocate resources (a) efficiently (b) at a large scale and ( c ) without falling to politicking and power games, I’m all ears. Myself, I still believe that market-based approaches are better, and that we should leave the government only to (local-level) regulations.