Nice idea but we shouldn’t associate open source software as “free software”. Yes it can be associated to freedom and freely available but it also suggests that no one ever has to pay for it.

This software even though it is freely available is not free of monetary cost. Someone has to pay for it either with their own money, their expertise or their time … all of which cost people money.

It becomes a whole different level of cost when it comes to open source social media. You need people to run the software, maintain the software, update the software, secure the software … then throw in servers, routing, security … and as instances grow in size you need more hardware, hardware upgrades, updates and people and organizations to maintain it all … at one point in the growth of open source social media, you start to need dedicated full time people to work at maintaining these things.

I’ve chatted with some instance owners and maintainers who say they don’t mind the work because it is limited at this time. Many of them are already professionals with well paying jobs and they don’t mind doing this on the side as a hobby or passion project. However the work is light at this time because there aren’t that many users and the communities are small. But over the past year I’ve noticed more and more instances changing and growing to accommodate a growing user base … it all ends up costing money.

So it isn’t totally “free”

A better and healthier way to see it is to call it “Open source” and remind every one that a critical thing that we should all understand in this new age of open source software is that crowd funding, sponsorship, contributions, donations should all be normalized by everyone who uses this software. And it doesn’t cost that much either. If every open source user just spent a dollar once in a while to the project or software that they used the most or liked the most, then it would add up to thousands of dollars for the developer. The same goes to instance owners and maintainers - we need to properly and regularly fund these guys to keep them all stable and working.

Personally I’ve been contributing for years to projects like Wikipedia, LibreOffice and GIMP … and over the past year or two I’m a small time regular contributor to the instance I use at Lemmy.ca

The danger with just calling it ‘free’ is in making everyone believe that no one has to pay for these services. The danger to not properly funding these projects is that eventually the costs have to be taken up by someone and that is usually the developers themselves or the maintainers or managers. And as popularity and user numbers grow, the costs only add up.

The problem comes when developers and managers have to figure out how to get more money to keep their project alive which is where corporate creep and advertising options start appearing. And also, as one platform becomes popular and becomes too expensive to maintain then it starts showing monetary value for corporations to take over. Corporate rot starts setting in when these projects are not properly funded and kept alive and developers or owners have to make the choice between being underfunded by their userbase … or making a bunch of money by selling out to a company or corporation.

We have to start normalizing funding, sponsorship, contributions and donations because that will protect our communities from being swallowed up by corporate interests in the future. If we don’t fund or pay for these things … some millionaire or billionaire will eventually come along to use their wealth at the cost of ownership and control and eventually lock up everything again behind a wall and a gate.

Sounds kinda inconvenient to put it on Valentine’s Day as everyone will be preoccupied for obvious reasons…