> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

For a piece of hardware I buy at a store I'd expect that the price I paid for it is sufficient to not require further monetization - mandatory cloud services (e.g. a web-available surveillance camera) excepted.

Anyway, there is another cause: continuous backward-compatibility breaks from OSes. Windows is ... relatively decent in that the only things that really broke drivers over the last decades were the shift in GPU driver architecture that came with Vista (IIRC) and the shift to 64-bit that began with Windows 7. The only change that busted old games was with Windows 8 and the DirectDraw removal, but other than that you don't need to do any maintenance for Windows drivers and software if you don't have new features.

Keeping software working on macOS or on Linux is a real pain in the butt, in contrast - Apple changes stuff around every minor release, and maintaining any support for Linux is just as a massive effort.

Kernel drivers pretty much have no choice but upstreaming (which is a hassle in itself when you have proprietary blobs/IP), and userspace stuff suffers from fragmentation (x11 vs wayland, flatpak vs deb vs rpm vs self-build/gentoo, systemd vs sysv, kde vs gnome vs ...).

And the worst of all to maintain anything for is Android, where an insane level of fragmentation collides with even more binary blobs, devices that are widespread in usage but haven't seen an upgrade for years if ever, shoddy (or none...) QA and preloaded crap from manufacturers and carriers.

If adware makes money, then even hardware is impacted since you can now undercut competitors. Two mice, essentially the same but $40 price tag. Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on them in the store?

> Which one do you buy? Can you smell the bloatware on them in the store?

This is why I prefer to shop online or at least do a quick search on the internet to show potential issues.

On the other hand, I would really prefer a requirement for products that are sold in a physical store to be reviewed by a government-run, independent organization on build quality and sustainability, and that this review be presented or easily accessible in a store next to the product.

We already have such a requirement in the EU for electricity usage of appliances, it could be extended to small electronic devices.

> maintaining any support for Linux is just as a massive effort.

Is it? ALSA still works, even if routed through PulseAudio or PipeWire. X11 still works even if what you are talking to is XWayland. OpenGL still works even if there is also Vulkan now.

Even if you want to stay up to date with the audio/windowing API of the day there are libraries like SDL that will help you stay up to date.

> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

What do you mean, can't sell software? Lately you can't BUY software. Everything is either free or subscription based. And they sell your data even if you pay for a subscription.

This is the thing that makes me most upset. I'd very happily pay more of they'd stop selling my data, but since it's always there as an option I basically have to either selfhost, be robbed, or get politically active on the topic.

A similar thing happened in games. I'm old enough to remember horse armour in Oblivion. Ridiculous idea but look where we are now. Not only do most microtransactions cost more, they aren't only in free to play games. They're in full price games and those with monthly subscriptions. And they have enough people arguing that it's a good thing because more money = better game.

I can buy a mount in a game for USD$40... or I could buy another game.

At least horse armor in Oblivion was DLC - basically a tiny expansion - even if cut down and sold at price / value that was outrageous compared to previous expansions. Microtractions have grown to be way more egregious since then:

- Generally locked to an account, so either not resellable or only within the Developer's market where additional profit can be extracted for each sale.

- There seem to be more and more consumable microtransactions, so you have to keep buying to get the same experience.

- Lootboxes and other gambling mechanics that mean you are not even guaranteed to get what you want when you pay.

And then we got to add gambling mechanics into "microtransactions" which weren't so micro anymore. At least with horse-armor and DLC you see what you get. With gacha and lootboxes you can't be even sure about that.

And the money is gone forever. At least with Valve who kinda made it big you can recoup some of investment if you get lucky and use it to buy other games on their platform...

> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

If you can't sell software and have to monetize it somehow, sure you can steal user data. But you can also steal user data even if you sell the software, as has been demonstrated many times.

Only authors who have no intend to monetize the software could really be trusted.

The ability to directly sell software is necessary but not sufficient to enable a software ecosystem that is not about exploiting the user.

That's why I mentioned forcing functions. Once "free" became the norm, it became impossible to even think about doing anything else. The door to conventional honest business models was closed for most software authors and vendors.

The notion of all software actually being free is a fantasy, unless you are talking only about software that can only be used by nerds. The amount of effort required to make software usable by the general public is absolutely massive. Then throw in constant UI changes, ecosystem changes, and supporting a lot of targets.

In general once the app basically works you are 10% done. The other 90% of the effort is UI/UX.

Worth noting that 'crypto' creates an opening for new ways to fund open-source development. Let's try not strangling that in its crib? We're approaching the 40th anniversary of the GNU Manifesto, and if the older funding models were going to take free software beyond the niches it's found, we'd see that by now.

Precisely. Payment processors gatekeeping the collection of small donations is soon to be a solved problem thanks to cryptocurrency. I mistrust anything that purports to enable something like this via centralised banking, primarily because it will let regulators of unrelated jurisdictions and large corporations/banks control and surveil the transactions. It's either crypto, or this.

I'm skeptical if the problem is technical about micropayments.

Let's assume we have some hypothetical zero fee universal payment platform. You CAN send a developer 3 cents because you like his work.

But now you've got the psychological barrier-- people don't want to think about spending 3 cents, even if they aren't bothered by the cost in the abstract. Then you need to make it a cultural norm-- that sending 3 cents is a legitimate gesture of gratitude and not unintentionally offensive or sarcastic.

IMO, the lack of micro (and I mean micro on order of 3 cents, like you mentioned) payment platforms is what kept such tiny donations from being normalised. My theory is that it will become normalised in certain circles, now that it's technically possible.

Even if it's a very, very thin trickle of donations, I would still take it as evidence that someone appreciates my work enough to think "hey, I should really send some money this guy's way, he's helped me out with this software/blog post". Allowing transactions on the order of single cents mitigates the psychological barrier of making some donation at all to the highest extent possible.

> If you can’t sell software you have to monetize in other ways.

Somebody had to say it out loud...