i was away from the forum for some days. Here is my delayed report for Free Software Donation Day, September 2014:
This month i donated to F-Droid. F-Droid is a repository of open source android software and a client for easy install, update and removal.
F-Droid builds open source android apps from source and provides installable, binary apks. You may download them individually from their website or install the F-Droid “Store”.
Donations are possible via PayPal, Flatter and bitcoin. Sadly no Bank Transfer. Donate here if you like.
What are your favorite Open Source Apps of the Month September?
Flym, RSS reader, available on F-Droid, untied to any provider, accepting any xml feeds lists that you can export from a computer RSS reader.
For me it was up and running almost instantly and with all my usual feeds thanks to this
And the interface is efficient and very reasonable.
I think there is a misunderstanding here. Threema is not Free Software!
A Free Software alternative would be TextSecure by Open WhisperSystems. You can donate to them either through their interesting Bithub project or through the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Question: what’s the (ethical) difference between buying a paid-for app and getting an app for free and making a donation? A developer asking money for using its app isn’t inherently evil or something.
He isn’t at all, and I would even go further: I for one regret the good old times of what was called “shareware” (who remembers this term).
I even went so far as to have a thread created that is dedicated to those softwares that one can buy -but outside the Google thing (like indeed Threema is).
I consider there are areas where actually paid teams can do better than the alternate model where healty enough societies (generally in the University or Research field) manage to offer worktime for creating Open Source.
Indeed Open Source, for the transparence, and what once was shareware or small independent companies are my two areas of love.
But, in this thread, here, the title and discussion is about Free software, which explains the reaction from Haffenlauer I think.
And now I’m rushing to add Threema in the ‘independently paid’ thread above before you
The topic of this thread is “Free Software Donation Day”, strictly speaking it is only concerning Free and Open Source Software, with Free defined as in freedom.
Some free software apps are sold in the play store and still the source is accessible for free, for example DavDroid.
In this case, by buying the app you support a free software developer. It is essentially the same as a donation, but keep in mind Google is charging the developer 30% of the price.
In other cases, the is a difference between buying an paid and supporting a free software developer with a donation.
Please keep this thread about free software, as I wanted to support developers releasing their quality software as free and open source. If have the impression that the model the DavDroid developers are choosibg , eg. Charging a price for the comfort of installing an App from the Play Store and still providing full sources and apk for free is beneficial for both users and developers. It enables them, the developer means to live by their profession, and developing a quality of an app is hard work, and gives us, the users all benefits of open source software.
I prefer to install my apps from Fdroid and therefore I relay daily on the work of these idealistic developers. Providing them with a bit of money is an easy way to show my appreciation. It also possibly enables them to improve their apps.
I therefore choose on free app a month and donate some money. I encourage you to do the same ;).
Free Software has nothing to do with getting paid for developing it.
It is about the freedom that comes with it.
Proprietary software restricts the user’s (or customer’s) freedom to have control over what the software does.
Free Software allows the user, or the customer, to have full control.
This may seem unimportant to most because they lack the knowledge and skills to actually do much with the freedom that comes with free-software, but Free Software is about an ideal, not really a coding practice (as Open Source simply is) or a business model.
Free Software can be free of charge or paid just like proprietary software, a user can be asked to pay for services like professional support or ad-hoc customization and consulting.
But regardless of what business model the developer(s) choose(s) to employ, free software will always allow, unlike proprietary software (free of charge or not), anybody to have control.
I understand that the terminology doesn’t help and this is a known problem, the word “free” means both freedom and gratis and software can be both or none or either, therefore the only thing that matters, for Software Freedom and, I suppose, for the purpose of this thread, is that software must be released under a Free License.
So no, developers of non-free software are not evil because they put a price tag on their products, in the same way as developers of free-software are not sellouts when they ask for money to let others use their products or to work on other’s free-software.
Whether developing non-free software is evil in itself, I leave to you to decide. Personally I feel proprietary is the dark side.
@Stefan i missed October. But it is still time until tomorrow to decide for November.
I am thinking of Kontalk , an open source (soon to be xmpp-based) messenger, or AntennaPod, a nice podcast manager. There are a lot of other apps i use everyday, so i have ideas until late into next year :-). Are you joining me in November?
I don’t use either… And would rather donate to an app, which I am using.
Too bad that F-Droid doesn’t have a bank account for donation, so I can’t join you for the September donation.
I am thinking about giving some money to K-9 Mail, as it really is much better than the default E-Mail app.
It’s important to note that Flattr takes a share of 10% (!) which is much higher than any other payment service I know of, including Paypal. (You can still have other reasons to avoid Paypal, of course)
@Herve5, @haffenloher Thanks for your interest and contribution but let us please try to keep on topic. This is not to discuss payment/donation providers but which OS software for smartphones we support financially.
@sim6 Which developers are you supporting with gratipay?
My supported project for November is Kontalk. Kontalk is a open source messenger for Android. Currently it’s developer is investing a lot of work to make it compatible with the XMPP protocol, a standard messaging protocol supporting custom clients and decentralized servers, more like email. He therefore is very active in proposing XMPP extensions and developing a new version of kontalk using that protocol.
Kontalk uses your phone number for username to make it easier to discover other users. The kontalk network provides the servers for message exchange and i hope to contribute to these costs as well as software development with my (arguably very small) donation of 4€.
Are you joining? What are your supported projects of November 2014?
@sim6 thanks for sharing. gratipay seems to be very interesting, but recurring payments are somewhat incompatible with my idea to donate/pay to on developer every month. however, they may be a more sustainable solution for apps or services you really rely on.
this thread was the final impulse i needed to finally start donating to causes i want to support.
I just transferred some cash to Coinbase, so in a few workdays I’ll have some bitcoin wich I can use to donate with gratipay.
I will do it like this: My donation budget will be 10$/month in the beginning (I’m a student right now, in a few years I’ll have income and can donate more).
I divide my donations in 4 groups, wich will all get 1/4 of my monthly budget:
-environment
-basic human rights
-free libre stuff (software, hardware, multimedia, information)
-services i use
Each cause will get a rating in each of those 4 groups.
for example fairphone will get 0,5 points in both environment (for their effort in reducing e-waste) and basic human rights (for their effort in improving the situation for miners and factory workers.), 0,2 points in the free libre category (because they generally are open to openness, but are far away from getting a “respects your freedom” approval from the fsf and from being free/open source hardware) and 1 point in services i use (because i use the fairphone and I’m really happy with it and the support/community).
In each group then the share of my budget (currently 10/4 = 2,5$) is divided by the total number of awarded points. the result is the ‘worth’ of each point. e.g in environment there are currently 3 causes: wwf and greenpeace each with 1 point and fairphone with 0,5 points. so the sum is 2,5 points, wich means each point is worth 1$, so greenpeace and wwf get 1$ and fairphone 0,5$. (in this category. totally fairphone will get 1,26$)
Fairphone, as well as many other causes I want to donate to, is not on gratipay yet, but there is an option to ‘pledge’ to not yet existing users and as soon as they join gratipay they will start recieving the monthly donations.
I donated to GnuPG. In the light of the Snowden revelations I found it incredible that such an important project relies on a single main developper. According to the latest article in Der Spiegel the PGP-Standard still seems to be “NSA-proof”.
I was not at home last Friday, but here is my Donation for Free Software Donation Day Dezember 2014: Mozilla.
I really like Mozilla’s efforts with Firefox OS and i still use Firefox for Web and Thunderbird for Mail on my PC. The first app i install on my Fairphone is always Firefox for Android. Given the included browser is somewhat old and does not live up to my expectations of a modern web browser, Firefox is a great and incredible useful app for me i use everyday.
You can donate to Mozilla here: https://sendto.mozilla.org/ by CreditCard, Paypal and Bitcoin (bitcoin is somewhat hidden).
