You don't have to worry about that BS if you use free software alternatives either. Plus you get to contribute to an alternative ecosystem that is also a lawful and moral alternative (Because piracy is both illegal and immoral in many circles.)
You already contribute by growing the community. Software benefits from network effects. E.g. a large hurdle for Libreoffice adoption is the fact that many documents are in the MS proprietary formats. Messengers like Signal or Telegram are in the same boat. As the community grows, the chance increases for someone to contribute by coding or money, or hiring the lead devs for support contracts. It doesn't have to be you, but if you (and others) hadn't used the software before them, that person might not have used it in the first place.
Yes, you can increase your value to the project thousandfold with more direct contributions like coding, bugfixes, donations, community work, etc, but already being part of the community is of help.
If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
If you want your open source developers to eat, they need cold hard cash.
From the lwn link above:
> Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the
existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling
Desktop LibreOffice.
> Collabora - despite C'bra still putting a lot of work into
LibreOffice Desktop, having an outstanding support capability, doing
lots of marketing, being the largest code contributor to LibreOffice,
and having lots of existing happy customers / references for desktop
LibreOffice, ... etc. etc.
> We have not had -one- -single- -new- Collabora Office
customer since 2018 - zero.
(for context: the former LibreOffice development team of SUSE joined Collabora in 2013, so they're not a scrappy new startup completely disjointed from Libreoffice)
> If you participate in the community, you can be a boon or you can also be a drag (if you just use the software in the privacy of your home, report problems and ask questions, without every giving back in any way, not even by answering other folks' questions).
Whether problem reports are a help or hindrance depends strongly on the type of report. A low information "it broke" post is a hindrance. A high information post giving steps to reproduce, having looked for similar bug reports, giving system details needed to reproduce the report, should be a help.
Thanks for linking the E-mail, it was a very interesting read!
200 million users means the community is huge. Not every project is in a situation like that. It means that Libreoffice creates tremendous value around the globe, and extracting just some of that value means the development efforts can be grown.
There are positive things in that e-mail as well: many large institutional users do contribute back.
Also note that well researched bug reports can be helpful for the community, especially if you post workarounds you found into the bug thread, and the thread is accessible by search.
As for Collabora, I'm not sure how much they engage in marketing? Maybe if they increase such efforts/change strategy they can grow their number of customers.
As a major Open Source contributor, I'd say that advocating the software goes a long way.
For example, in one of my last job (I'm a freelance), I could get paid full time to contribute to open source tools because the guy taking the decision heard about PostgreSQL and open source somewhere. If that guy has only heard about Oracle, the same work would have gone closed source.
If the person responsible for the office solution of a school heard of open office from you, you did help a lot. Because many times, big open source users will invest in open source, in form of support, custom development or just sponsoring.
Easy: send them some money. I do, at times I even sent money to projects I deem important though I'm not actually using them, like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
It's true only if you find torrents "in the wild". You can lurk/participate in an established torrent forum which gives you user reports, discussions, seeder score and a community mindset instead of a c00l w4r3z download mindset in general. Idk of english or international ones, but only because I never looked for one. TPB and KAT are not good examples, cause these look(-ed) like boards rather than forums, although I never had any issues with using them either.
In addition to gp's point: After settling my income I began buying software (games mostly) on steam/etc to support studios I like, but it is still much easier to torrent it afterwards and to not deal with bs that stores represent. I never realized before how much hassle it is to own a legal version of everything. You pay your money and they don't even bother of your convenience or digital rights, only theirs. Recently I bought starcrart remastered (without torrenting) and that battle.net downloads over 200mb over my adsl line every flipping time I try to run it. As a result, I just watch falcon pal match reviews at youtube and never run it. Blizzard deserved that money for sure, but man isn't that stupid.
I don't know about software, but pirated games are generally more secure, stable and performant with less spyware than the official games with all the DRM.
Haven't played video games for some time, but at least when I was still pirating, malware and spyware was pretty common. Bugs and incompatibilities caused by pirating were also not unheard of.
Playing pirated game is putting trust into the hands of some anonymous hackers. And that begs the question, what do they gain from giving out the game for free?
They could be doing it just for fun, for coolness, or out of altruism. And that's true for probably many case. But to say none of them wanted to earn expedient money would not persuade me.
Citation needed. I guess you’re probably right but companies are way more accountable than random internet person who modified the dll/binary to work without copy protection.
I remember hearing about at least one game that was significantly more performant when pirated (I think it was by Ubisoft). They had so much code for DRM and network tracking that it was faster to just stop that code from executing by hacking the game.
This happened with Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion. It updated the included version of Denuvo and added many, many threads that constantly scanned the game executable for modifications as an anti-cheat mechanic.
A modder distributed a tool to bypass the anti-cheat and restore performance the same day the expansion released. It took over two weeks for Capcom to get the game playable again, and many more before they improved performance back to roughly pre-update levels.
For reference, I'd been using Steam Proton to play the base game on Linux and was getting 60fps at nearly max settings. After the update, I got 1. One frame per second. I saw a number of similar reports from native Windows players.
You don't follow games recently (meaning 10 years at least). There are few publishers that put pretty nasty DRM protections inside that run constantly, take few % of the CPU and do constant full memory checks (among other things). Performance drop is visible unless you have obscurely expensive hardware.
This is kind of expected for online gaming due to many folks fucked up mentality of using cheats and playing with rest of the crowd (some psychologists could probably go quite deep on breaking this down to mostly childhood issues). If you play on your own, its just a pain in the a.
Many people buy the game and then play pirated version, just to avoid this kind of punishment of the lawful citizens.
Probably over half the popular multiplayer products on Steam have rootkits in them that send a lot of data about you straight to the publisher. Companies are not accountable for the things you want them to be accountable for, so for normal people it just looks like they're not accountable at all.
I tend to buy (indie, Linux) games on gog/humble bundle/itch.io, or on the official developer website. When I have to use steam it really pains me, their client, drm, marketing forced accounts, pricing policy .. are a pita.
