V Fri, Sep 01, 2023 at 02:25:37PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé napsal(a):
On Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 10:18:50PM -0000, Ryan Bach via devel wrote:
> It would be nice for Redhat to monetize the Desktop. What do you guys think?
IMHO talking about Red Hat needing to monetize the desktop is missing
the point of this. There are 1000's of OSS projects that will never be
interesting to big the Linux vendors like Red Hat, SUSE, etc, and yet
the people working on those projects still have bills to pay.
The proposals wrt donations / payments in Flathub would support the
long tail of OSS projects, by providing another place to potentially
collect some funds directly from users, without having a commercial
Linux vendor in the middle picking & choosing who to give funding to
while skimming off the top of the funds.
That's quite naive idea. In real world any middle man who collects and
distributes money in order to "sell software" will have to obey to financial,
tax, and security regulations. Thus no middle man will do this task without
skimming the funds. Commercial entities are better suited for this role than
non-profit organisations.
It would be another story if the transaction system did not involve money.
E.g. delivering payment information from software authors to software users
and delivering software in the same direction. However, these nonmonetery
systems suffer from various fraud attempts and loss of trust.
Commercial middle entities fights against the frauds by requesting personal
data and cash deposits. That's another level of regulations which nobody will
undergo for "free".
Then what left is mediating donations. But that does not need any formal or
unified system. Software authors can siply keep a notice in README/About with
a payment details.
-- Petr