i hate it but also the KDE "adopt an app" initiative is kinda poggers.
us "extreme leftists" in FOSS might find it cringe but it seems like a good step towards educating the public about FOSS and finding more practical and user-focused ways to fund it.
@cas What would be cringe about it?
@newbyte having to engage in "the system" to get broader appeal to fund foss
@dos @cas @newbyte The GPL is a judo move that uses the weight of "the system" to let us build something far away from it, and copyleft is there to help prevent it from eating what we built. If you do things like "adopt an app" you start to play within "the system's" rules and build a dependency on it, which goes a bit against the initial goals. They aren't comparable.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but I do see how that's an issue. I don't like that much either.
@KekunPlazas @cas @newbyte OK, I may be missing something actually? What's so worrying about "adopting an app" aside of it being somewhat cheesy? It sounds like playing to people's egos and their sense of agency in order to encourage donations, is there more to it?
@dos @cas @newbyte The way I see it, when your anticapitalist project becomes your source of income, you'll depend on it for your living and start looking for more ways to capitalize on it, and it will start losing its deep transformative capabilities. Emphasis on *deep*, I'm not saying it will lose all transformative capabilities.
If you see the project in a liberal way in the first place, then it's of course not an issue as it's just a quirky freedom-coated product.
@KekunPlazas @dos @cas @newbyte though then this is not different at all to any other donation method some Devs are using right now already (in gnome). If someone doesn't like that they can still deny any donations. Or donate them to the gnome foundations so nobody profits directly. Tbh though I haven't read all details about that KDE thing yet.
@dos @newbyte i don't think engaging on the legal side is that relevant here, particularly since the ideological pull of merely having something like the GPL is absolutely not something that gets people to engage with FOSS in the same way it might have 20 years ago.
people today find FOSS through media and adjacency to topics they care about (gaming, emulators, tools that "just work" when you get sick of scummy paid software), many more people who actively use free software and maybe even run Linux do not give more of a fuck about the GPL than they might about other progress issues.