What if I paid for all my free software?

I've always felt guilty by taking for granted the rare breed of virtuous humans that provide free excellent software without relying on advertising. Let's change that and pay, how much would I “lose” anyway?


Requirements for consideration

  1. No advertising, trackers, etc., whatsoever.
  2. Free*. All of the main features must be available for free.
  3. No already rich people/companies.
  4. No association with or reference to crypto“currencies” because these are greed incentivizing pyramid schemes.
  5. That I'd be quite annoyed if said software didn't exist.

– – – – –

* There's an important distinction between different definitions of free software: “free beer” ≠ “open source” ≠ “freedom” [].

The donation amount

The donation amount is in proportion to my usage frequency and whether software is in constant development such as an operating system (OS)—not to be confused with malware that is Microsoft Windows [], better known as “Windoze”.

Click to reveal a completely unconstructive sardonic NSFW Windoze definition, if loathing Microsoft is your thing*.

“a shitty operating system created by a monopoly. Commonly used by idiots who are too stupid to RTFM. The only feature that Windoze has that Linux doesn't is the BSOD, commonly seen by Windoze users.” —I hate winblows []

Jesting aside, before talking money I must admit my bias toward owning instead of subscribing. However, considering something that's under constant development one cannot expect to pay for it once and receive all subsequent non-security updates. Time has been invested by its developers and staying alive is expensive. In this case a monthly subscription makes sense. Conversely, for software that doesn't get updates, or doesn't need to get them, or where the updates don't matter personally, a one-time donation seems sufficient. The highest tier subscription gets €3.50 a month—“tree fiddy”, the middle tier €2.25, and the default tier €1. One-time donations are €5.

—Video: “Tree fiddy” scene from The Succubus, South Park (S3E3) [].

– – – – –

* Windows users are not idiots by default. Most people just don't know any better because of Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior.

Computer software

Lichess is safe, because it is free of ads and trackers.

But browsing the rest of the Internet exposes us to the following threats:

These don't benefit us, the website users, in any way. In fact, they use a lot of our computing power and bandwidth against us.” —Thibault Duplessis []

– – – – –

* €4.77 instead of €5 due to currency conversion; not all PayPal widgets allow for decimals.

Subscriptions only

Smartphone software

Exceptions

Bonus

I added Bunnytrack and Unreal Tournament because a prodigious small community has kept alive and perfected a 24-year-old game/mod just because. Bunnytrack, to me, represents a game as perfect as Age of Empires 2, and exemplifies how any game company should proceed by building upon solid foundations and embracing the modding/mapper community, not by releasing new instalments every other year, splitting up communities (e.g., UT2003UT2004UT3). This topic deserves a separate essay.

Total amount

Here we have it, a yearly €410.97 bill. I haven't even included websites yet, nor all the other software I use.

Open Collective #1: Manjaro, AntennaPod, Xfce.

Open Collective #2: EndeavourOS, F-Droid.

Liberapay: FlorisBoard.

Screenshot of PayPal payments.
“Shut up And Take My Money!” is a catchphrase used to express enthusiastic approval toward a product or idea. It is often associated with an image macro featuring the character Fry from the animated television series Futurama.
—Image: Shut Up And Take My Money!, Futurama [].

Feasibility of altruism

The individual donations may seem trivial, but let's say a piece of software has 10000 users—0.0000012% of humanity—and they all pay €5, that's a decent sum. Unfortunately only a minority of people pay for free software [], rarely enough to live on. More realistically, the majority of humanity cannot cough up a yearly ±€400 for donations because 105 countries have a median yearly income below $5291.04 [] which means €400 is more than one month's wage.

But let me throw a curveball: ideally they shouldn't pay. People shouldn't be reliant on the whims of greedy white men such as myself who more often indulge a €4.5 portion of French Fries unnecessary for sustenance rather than investing it in something meaningful—not to be mistaken with something lucrative, because I am under the impression that the profit motive is what's killing our habitat [], us.

Creative people who contribute for the sake of creativity, not for profit, should be able to do so without having to worry about food or housing. Let's go beyond that, not only creative people, but everyone. After all, who is to decide what is useful? Or when it is useful? Pure mathematics research often takes decades to find applications. Moreover, similarly to why we can only discern happiness through the contrast with sadness, we need the “useless” to discern the useful. Nothing matters and everything matters. We're a collection of atoms meandering on a rock that's speeding through space, orbiting the Sun at 30 ㎞ per second, in a solar system that's orbiting the center of our galaxy at 200 ㎞ per second []. Tell me again how important you think you are?

Calvin [Looking at the star-filled sky]: I'm significant! [Keeps his gaze] Screamed the dust speck.
—Image: Calvin and Hobbes for October 14, 1993 by Bill Watterson [].

Hear me coming yet? Universal basic income, UBI. What would a society look like where people who provide excellent products free of charge, despite working a full-time job, could pursue their side projects full-time instead? What would the world look like if the hundreds of thousands impoverished kids could be studying? There's so much wasted talent.

Screenshot of Mastodon post: “Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong. The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts. The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have. Stephen Jay Gould wrote: 'I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops'. [Followed by the following headline screenshot: “Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: 'If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts'””
—Image: Peter Gleick's “Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.” Mastodon post [].

Considering the extent of our Western excesses we definitely have the means to level the playing field to such an extent. If we Westerners lived like we did one hundred years ago we'd still have more luxury than most of Earth's population. As I have quoted Buckminster before in Einstein's theory of antiwork and The folly of pride, I shall do so again and again until it collectively seeped into our thick skulls:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” —Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) []

“Shit-ass pet fuckers.”

Albeit hypocritical, I still often imagine being rich. Not only do I want to support developers that refuse ads, I also desperately want to apply Louis C.K.'s “shit-ass pet fucker” method for skateparks. It's so goddamn frustrating that my local skatepark isn't able to own a permanent building and had to move four times already []. Our economic system has lifted us out of poverty and into exorbitant wealth—by exploiting other countries, mind you—but there's something seriously flawed if a project with obvious societal benefits can't stand on its own feet.

—Video: “Shit-ass pet fuckers” routine by Louis C.K.

The best-case utopian scenario however, is that there wouldn't exist and wouldn't be a need for absurdly affluent people who can singularly decide who gets money, who gets to live or die. For one, power causes brain damage which renders rich people literally incapable of knowing what is best for others:

“Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.”

“And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy.” —Power Causes Brain Damage, by Jerry Useem for The Atlantic [].

Furthermore, their supposed philanthropy isn't just them giving money away no-questions-asked. More often than not they aim to benefit their coffers and/or virtue signal their “conscience”:

“They are moving away from unfettered, no-strings-attached giving and toward increased donor control over organizations, and are blurring the lines between private investment and public benefit.” —Gilded Giving 2020, by Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery [].

“Your "Giving Pledge" has a loophole that renders it practically worthless, namely permitting pledgees to simply name charities in their wills. I have found that most billionaires or near billionaires hate giving large sums of money away while alive and instead set up family-controlled foundations to do it for them after death. And these foundations become, more often than not, bureaucracy-ridden sluggards. These rich are delighted to toss off a few million a year in order to remain socially acceptable. But that's it.” —Robert Wilson to Bill Gates, 2010 []

Rewind, play: “These rich are delighted to toss off a few million a year in order to remain socially acceptable.

They know it and we know it, the simplest argument against the ultra rich is that it's downright unethical. Inevitable exceptions aside, as long as there are people without a home, the ability to own more than one, for-profit, should be unlawful. The reason why there's a housing crisis is not migration—a scapegoat they would like you to believe—but gluttonous buffoons buying up everything []. The game is rigged.

Good governance

Before we hoist our pitchforks Ψ, let's consider non-violent solutions first: good governance and taxes. In the Very Bad Wizards podcast they were asking if capitalism is at the root of crime, or if it's human nature; “do there exist non-capitalist societies where there is no crime?” [] Apparently yes, but at much smaller scale. However, having asked a history buff friend of mine (G. V.), the converse exists as well. What conclusion can we draw from this? Managing people well is notoriously difficult. The solution? Philosopher kings. Greed and violence is in our nature, and that's why we can only have the most incorruptible in charge. Sounds laughably naive right? Why though? Marcus Aurelius has done it before, we can do it again.

“Many Athenians saw philosophers as perpetual adolescents, skulking in corners and muttering about the meaning of life, rather than taking an adult part in the battle for power and success in the city. On this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.”

“Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, […]” —Melissa Lane, Britannica [].

What makes us corruptible though? My bet's on a lack of money. “How is that? Doesn't corruption affect both the rich and the poor?” Yes. The poor directly and the rich indirectly—poverty versus pretense, blue-collar crime versus white-collar crime. My assumption is that the rich think that by merit they're better than those who aren't and are therefore able to internally justify their behaviour, their white-collar crimes. Not even justify, many have simply lost the capacity to see a problem with it—remember that Power Causes Brain Damage. An ego so large that it thinks it's another superior species altogether. A species that factory farms the hoi polloi similarly to how the hoi polloi condones factory farming non-human animals. In all of this lies the failure to grasp the cause of the chasm in culture or the lack of culture on both sides, the orthogonal upbringing and education between the two is due to income disparity. If both parties would share more commonalities, e.g., by making proper education accessible for all I foresee we'd become far less frustrated with each other. Education should bring us closer together, and not create further imaginary divide.

Rich or poor, Axis or Allies, most of us are not truly evil, we've just never learned to think properly. Hence the need for a philosophical uprising. Hannah Arendt about the atrocities that took place during World War 2:

“…the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness.” —Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) []

Rephrased for the film Hannah Arendt (2012):

“This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.” —Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

So, how do we go about distributing the chips more fairly?

Your Greed Is Hurting The Economy refers to a political cartoon by Nick Anderson depicting a capitalist man in a suit on top of a pile of money yelling, 'Your greed is hurting the economy!' at a protestor on the ground who is holding a sign reading, 'Raise the minimum wage.' —Know Your Meme
—Image: Your Greed Is Hurting The Economy by Nick Anderson [].

Taxes

We level the playing field by stopping tax evasion.

“[…] Multinational companies use all sorts of tax strategies to shift their profits to tax havens, and they do it to the tune of an estimated one trillion dollars a year.” —Naomi Fowler

One might say that dividing one trillion dollars among the world population would only net each approximately $124, which doesn't strike as impressive. But that paints the wrong perspective. Tax avoidance decreases governmental investments in public goods such as healthcare [], it decreases revenue for developing countries for whom one unit of currency matters more [], basically it negatively affects everyone who plays fairly. Guess which corporation loves to evade taxes, drumroll: Microsoft. Windoze is not the only way they're screwing us.

“Naomi Fowler: KPMG’s brilliant idea was for Microsoft to sell its intellectual property to this 85 person factory it owned in Humacao. This time, KPMG persuaded the Puerto Rican government to give Microsoft a tax rate of close to zero percent. Microsoft shifted at least 39 billion in U. S. profits there. The IRS auditors discovered what they believed was some mightily creative accounting, some laughable numbers, in fact. Fast forward to 2023, and Microsoft announced the IRS had notified them that they owe 28.9 billion dollars in back taxes, plus Penalties and interest. Microsoft disputes that.”

[…]

“Naomi Fowler: Microsoft won that particular boxing round and got its internal appeal. And from now on, new legislation will make it harder for the IRS on that front. That’s because this huge lobby of tech and business groups lobbied hard. And to cut a long story short, a bill was passed into law, meaning the IRS will have to follow a new process if they want to block appeals or designate summons. And when they do, they’ll have to report directly to Congress.”

“Paul Kiel: You know, lobbyists for the corporate world and for wealthy taxpayers are good at making arguments in a way that emphasize the taxpayer rights aspect of things. So you end up with bills that are like called the Taxpayer Rights Act or that sort of thing, when oftentimes they’re picking issues that really only affect like the largest corporate taxpayers, but oftentimes they’ll try to characterize them as hurting small business. So that’s what you’re up against if you’re supportive of, you know, more muscle behind tax administration.” —The Taxcast: The People vs Microsoft []

Ready to install Linux yet?

“Fatality!”

“Fatality is the name given to a gameplay feature in the Mortal Kombat series of fighting video games, in which the victor of the final round in a match inflicts a brutal and gruesome finishing move onto their defeated opponent. Prompted by the announcer saying "Finish Him/Her", players have a short time window to execute a Fatality by entering a specific button and joystick combination, while positioned at a specific distance from the opponent.” []

On par with Ricky Gervais' Golden Globes 2020 Fatality of the Hollywood elite [], here's Rutger Bregman's billionaire Fatality at Davos 2019, which I kid you not starts at 1337:

🔊 “Finish Him!”

—Audio: Mortal Kombat's “Finish Him!” soundbite [].

—Video: Davos 2019:The Cost of Inequality.

“This is my first time at Davos, and I find it quite a bewildering experience to be honest. I mean fifteen hundred private jets have flown in here to hear Sir David Attenborough speak about how we're wrecking the planet. And I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency, but almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance; of the rich just not paying their fair share. I mean it feels like I'm at a fire fighter's conference and no one is allowed to speak about water. There was only one panel hidden away in the media center that was actually about tax avoidance, I was one of the fifteen participants, something needs to change here. Ten years ago, the World Economic Forum asked the question: "What must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash?" The answer is very simple, just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes. Taxes taxes. Just two days ago there was a billionaire in here, Michael Dell, and he asked the question: "Name me one country where a top marginal tax rate of 70% has actually worked", and you know I'm the historian, The United States, that's where it has actually worked. In the 1950s during the republican president Eisenhower, the war veteran. The top marginal tax rate in the US was 91% for people like Michael Dell. The top estate tax for people like Michael Dell was 70%. I mean, this is not rocket science. We can talk for a very long time about these stupid philanthropy schemes, we can invite Bono once more, but come one, we got to be talking about taxes. That's it, taxes taxes taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.” —Rutger Bregman, Davos 2019 [].

🔊 “Fatality!”

—Audio: Mortal Kombat's “Fatality!” soundbite [].

TL;DR

Support the people whose products you love when possible or fight corporate tax avoidance, lest we want to topple the actually representative Jenga tower below. I should've opened with this section before going all-out off-topic huh?

“Technology architecture is often illustrated by a stack diagram, in which higher levels of rectangles indicate components that are dependent on components in lower levels. This is analogous to a physical tower of blocks, in which higher blocks rest on lower blocks. The stack in this cartoon bears a striking resemblance to a physical block tower, suggesting the danger that the tower will lose its balance when a critical piece is removed, in this case a piece near the bottom, labeled as being maintained by a single semi-anonymous person located somewhere relatively unimportant doing it for their own unknown reasons without fame or acknowledgement. The concept of balance is not intended to be communicated by a stack diagram, making this a humorously absurd extension of a well-known diagram style.”—https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2347:_Dependency
—Image: xkcd 2347: Dependency, by Randall Munroe [].

—Angelino Desmet; 27 December 2023.

Latest edit: 26 February 2024.

🎅

Proof of payments

Click here to see the proof of payments (in case the clickability of the details/spoiler HTML tag wasn't clear in the text).

Open Collective #1: Manjaro, AntennaPod, Xfce.

Open Collective #2: EndeavourOS, F-Droid.

Liberapay: FlorisBoard.

Screenshot of PayPal payments.

Pending payments

Sources

  1. Ramin_HAL9001: I like what I am reading…But one quick criticism.

    “I only skimmed your article, but so far I like what I am reading, and how you dovetail it into a discussion about UBI and so on.

    But one quick criticism: if I were you I would try to get a bit more well-versed on the difference between “free-as-in-free-beer” software, “free-as-in-freedom” software, and “open source” software. There are lots of articles about this, especially at the The Free Software Foundation. But in short:

    • Free as in “free beer”: you can use the software without paying for it. They are usually making money off of you some other way, by charging certain users fees, by collecting and re-selling your private data, selling you ads, or all of the above.
    • “Open source”: means the source code is available and you might even be able to contribute to it, but the maintainers reserve the right to distribute modified builds of the “open source” version that can make money off you the same way “free beer” software does. It is a good way for large companies to get free work done for them (bug fixes, feature requests) from their technically literate users.
    • Free as in “freedom”: the software license guarantees by law that users of the software must have access to the exact source code of the build of the software that they are using (without modification) regardless of whether or not you charge money for it so that your end users have the freedom to inspect whether the code is honest. It also guarantees that you have the freedom modify the source code however you please, but the license contract requires that you grant the same freedom to everyone else who is using your modified copy of the source code. “Free as in freedom” software protects the freedom (as in civil liberties) of anyone who uses it, open source does not.”
  2. GNU Operating System: Microsoft's Software is Malware.
  3. Urban Dictionary: Windoze.
  4. Lichess: Block ads and trackers.
  5. Ditto Music: How Much Do Music Streaming Services Pay Musicians in 2023.
  6. Know Your Meme: Shut Up And Take My Money!
  7. Betterbird: Donation Appeal 2023.
  8. World Population Review: Median Income by Country 2023.
  9. GoComics: Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for October 14, 1993.
  10. Peter Gleick, Mastodon: Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.
  11. Wikiquote: Buckminster Fuller, 1970s.
  12. BX1, 2023: Anderlecht : la transformation de l’immeuble Citygate II oblige le skatepark Byrrrh & Skate à encore déménager.
  13. Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, 2017: Power Causes Brain Damage.
  14. Chuck Collins, Helen Flannery, 2020: Gilded Giving 2020, How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy.
  15. David Dawkins, Forbes, 2019: Buffett, Gates And The Giving Pledge: Trust Issues For Billionaire Philanthropists.
  16. Metro: Rapporteur: woningnood door slecht beleid, niet door vluchteling.
  17. Very Bad Wizards: Episode 256: The Right to Punish?
  18. Melissa Lane, Britannica: philosopher king.
  19. Know Your Meme: Your Greed Is Hurting The Economy.
  20. Nicole Parsons, George Takei: $1 trillion in unpaid corporate taxes would get everyone health care, an education, and a secure retirement. No wonder the GOP is thwarting it.
  21. The Taxcast: The People vs Microsoft.
  22. Wikipedia: Fatality (Mortal Kombat).
  23. YouTube: Ricky Gervais – Golden Globes 2020 (Uncensored, HD).
  24. Voicemod: Mortal Kombat's Finish Him sound byte - Meme Sound Effect Button for Soundboard.
  25. YouTube: Davos 2019 - The Cost of Inequality.
  26. Sound FX Center: MK Deception Fatality Sound Effect.

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