the monthly active users count didn’t really seen such a drastic drop, seem like something disappointed lemmy most devoted supporters , i didn’t notice a drop so big in such a short amount of time. there was also an increase in users after the initial surge of users in july due to the API drama. so i think the cooling down is over.
It’s good to see enhancement in moderations tools , there was a lot of feedback on that so i am happy this is being worked on.
With that said donations seem at a all time low (3,524), lower then when the new website started reporting donations ($3,962). on june 2 it was €4,010 , could the lemmy.ml censorship drama be related to this? maybe there is a way to mitigate this event?
Some of them are paid , they get donation money , and also from the NLNET iirc (which is tax payer money iirc).
Anyway this isn’t how you handle feedback , there is a reason wikipedia has a guideline called assume good faith , because if you are not assuming good faith you are probably assuming bad faith and that makes it difficult for an organisation to function for obvious reasons.
source available can allow a lot of things including modification of the source code (and in particular adding quality of life improvements and updating the code to run on modern platforms). Some restrictions like not allowing selling or even not allowing competition (for example allowing the game engine to run only the original game , or disallowing the removal of monetization).
If you look at openage (age of empires 2 reimplementation) the game is not playable 25 years after release and that game is considered a classic, we could lose a lot of very good games or software.
I would argue that even having a project as source available is better then closed source and can still be pretty good, look at for example the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project.
If anybody want to ask a game creator to make a game open source and he refuses, suggesting a source available license might still be a good idea.
You realize that the owner could be a truck driver for texas? that’s what mutual funds and pension funds do, they manage assets.
and taking a fixed price is like having a grocery store where all the products have the same price, businesses do a cost benefit analysis (estimating stuff like costs and expected income), having a single price does not make sense.
Create proprietary software project , sell the software and give all the profit to starving kids in africa beside taking in a modest salary (say the US median salary) and call fair code, it’s more fair then hashicorp CEO getting something like 100K a month in salary and stocks.
Integrating with patreon or opencollective where one of the rewards is access to supporter only lemmy communities might be a good use case for a plugin system.
I have been with multiple different communities that had GPL and other licensed code stolen for profit in proprietary programs. In all instances, the FSF, SFC and EFF were all contacted and nobody cared.
at least the SFC did some enforcing that worked, but i got the feeling these organisations are too “nice” , If the case is a slam dunk maybe it is possible to get a lawyer who will work by getting a large percentage of the earnings.
At that point, you’ve become a business. So yeah, you need skill to fundraise.
or a non profit, and not surprising running a business or a non profit requires the skills to manage a business or a non profit, iirc the software freedom conservatory and maybe the SPI say the can help with fundraising, but you need to be modest and consider you might benefit from learning from other people.
Fuck the companies, they will always take and never give anything back. They won’t give you money anyways, so might as well shut them down.
That’s just factually wrong, for example most of the contribution to the linux kernel are from companies, blender development fund is a good case study for this (see how much each corporate sponsors pays)
Fundraising is skill, and it needs to be learnt, I have looked at a fairly large chunk of open source project that are successfully funded and i think that is what sets them apart.
I think it is important that users should have a very clear understanding of how you are doing, if you need X money to keep doing this, there should be a pop up saying you need X money on the software and it should be very hard to miss on the website and read me.
Will some people not like that? probably but you can’t please everyone and you shouldn’t let a vocal minority determines how things happen.
the distinction between big and small companies is artificial , a big company can still have a small product with low profit margins, and both big and small companies can be managed by the same mutual funds and pension funds (vanguard , blackrock, fidelity etc).
Isn’t this a lawsuit waiting to happen?
My country has non profits that lobby for citizens , I wonder if there is enough motivation in the community to set something like that for FOSS, I don’t think existing non profits (FSF, OSI) will want to deal with that kind of stuff .
I think that could be said about a lot of specialized communities , you can do a wikipedia search , that’s better then just repeating the descriptions of software whenever they are mentioned.
I think the fediverse should take something from C++ playbook, it toke forever for the C++ 11 standard to be created but after the standard C++ foundation started getting significant funding which it used to fund work on standards the pace of publishing standards became a lot faster.
Their fiscal host is confusingly “Open Source Collective” and not the “Open Collective Foundation” .
Aren’t there better coins with better privacy (which might be a helpful property , because being known as a generous person might make you a attractive target to charity scams attempts) and also much lower fees (monero? nano? , which reportedly has no fees) and faster transactions times? (if we are using digital currencies, we might as well try to support the best project by using it).