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@neil what an interesting idea.
I have been wondering a little bit about some sort of FOSS type subscription.
Where you pay what you can to some charity/ funds distribution point.
Then the funds are distributed to all the software developers that support the FOSS software that you use.
Based maybe on hours of usage per month, or just some local tracking that sends a % breakdown only to the distro server.
So say I used
Thunderbird 30 hrs
Firefox 60 hrs
Linux Mint 90 hrs
Others 20 hrs
@neil Probably order of $100/yr but that'd have to be fully non shitty. No license checks. Opt-in only telemetry, no llm, no ads, etc.
@neil
€0 because I disagree with Mozilla Principle #9 #PrivacyFirst
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
Also I would need guarantees of a control less dependent of the US.
@neil I’d pay £100+. I use a browser all day long. And some of the evening too. It’s a hugely valuable product.
Sadly I’m a tiny and privileged minority.
@neil browsers appear to be comparable to an OS in terms of complexity etc, so definitely - in my current financial circumstances - on the order of £100 a year.
It would matter to me that it could be freely used by those without financial means. I could wish that such things were funded in the same way we fund tangible infrastructure...
@neil considering it's the app I use for 90% of my computing, if happily pay a tenner a month. I usually donate £100 to Firefox and Thunderbird annually, then another £100 to Ubuntu whenever I bump an LTS. I should probably do more, but it's better than nothing.
@neil There are so few examples of simple, straightforward paying for simple good software as a long-term way of providing or acquiring software that it's very hard to answer this. I wouldn't mind paying for good software, but I'd really want to *know* that it wasn't going to morph or sell out into a locked-in, data-harvesting, ai-driven cesspool. This is prob. an impossible precondition. If the Mozilla foundation was an ethical non-profit like Signal, I'd be more likely to pay them. ☹️
@neil 10 € or maybe more.
@neil Considering that I've started paying for (sane) search from Kagi, around $50-100 per year is starting to sound acceptable for a purely-functional-and-not-littered-with-nonsense browser.
Currently using Vivaldi for some of my browsing, but it is a bit different in how it approaches things.
@neil 25-50, I guess.
10-50€
It depends on my situation.
But at this rate, i will do more than usual if i can get something without AI shit implemented.
@neil £200 a year (personal licence for all my devices).
I use it exclusively on phone and desktop. I spend most of my online life in front of it and would be happy to pay if it guaranteed no bloody AI bollocks, and continued support.
@neil I'd say up to 200 euros per year, given that I'm an active user. However at that point I'd expect support and influence on what gets implemented and prioritised.
For projects that I know have the goals I'm interested in, I can donate, as I trust they will do the right thing.
For something like a web browser, however, feels like whoever's working on the product needs to be kept in a straight line to not get lured by "AI" or some other questionable trendy thing.
@neil $50-$100 with a permanent fallback license if i don't renew.
@neil donating 5 EUR/month to @thunderbird , 5 USD/month to @Vivaldi and Firefox could get the same. If Firefox stopped adding AI and crap (or at least stopped enabling it), I'd happily double the amount.
but it seems with or without money browsers mess up -- @Vivaldi would inject pages into my bookmark toolbar, even with me paying them.
@neil
Certainly i'd bear £10-20 a year without any hesitation. if there were other, shittier options, i might feel funny about paying more (years of struggling to meet bills have made me a cheapskate, even though money is a bit less tight now) but really it has to be worth £50/yr, doesn't it
@neil make a poll?
100€
@neil 60€/year is my usual donation for fundamental stack components (OS/Messenger/…).
Depending on the relevance and ease of replacement it can go down to 12€/year or just not donating. But I think browser would be in the 60€/year area.
I think one of the risks (which I also fall for) is "posterboy donations". You donate/pay to the front project but the dependencies fall apart.
@neil I'd be ok with 30-40€
For a site licence? £$€60 🙂
@neil Probably 5 £ / month, maybe more.
@neil I pay €5 a month for Servo and I don't even use it.
Which is a fucking Mozilla project. In a language that is a Mozilla project. Two among many Mozilla projects that only survive by no longer being that.
So I'm not giving "Mozilla Firefox" a cent. Not until it becomes "Firefox".
@neil £25 one-off license fee.
@neil ten bucks a month sounds realistic to me. Maybe more.
@neil Paying for de-enshittified IT products is like ordering tanks of oxygen to your house because you think there's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Even if I bought myself out of scams and slop, I would still be living among people harmed by them.
I don't want to be a cyberpunk protagonist in a personal luxury space looking down on a corporate dystopia
@neil For me, it would entirely depend on the maintainers making a commitment to integrate upstream accessibility fixes and enhancements in a timely manner.
If they were demonstrably doing that, I could see myself paying up to £200 per year.
@neil Maybe £200?
@neil Given how much I use a browser and value my privacy, £10/month sounds reasonable, so £120/year.
(if it wasn't so massively time-consuming and difficult I would write a browser myself, but I know how much work is involved and it's infeasible with the modern web)
@neil I donate £10-20 a year to Thunderbird (which is a separate entity these days iirc), would probably pay the same
