Episode: 973
Title: HPR0973: Freedom is not Free 4 - Money
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0973/hpr0973.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:53:52

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Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to what is now the fourth.
In our ongoing series called Freedom is not free.
We've already looked at the general issue of what we mean when we talk about freedom and
free software.
Then we took a look at the first of the issues that you could help with, which is filing
bugs, a very important activity.
And in our third program, we took a look at how you might be able to help with things
like documentation.
Well, today we're going to get to the spiritual part of this.
We're going to talk about money.
Money is an important thing.
The people who work in free software actually do need money.
It's something that I think is often overlooked.
Most of the stuff we do does have expenses.
It's associated with it.
If you are a developer working on a free software project, for instance, you may require some
amount of money to take care of your family.
Now I do understand that a lot of the developers that work in free software are supported by
corporate paycheck.
I think it is absolutely wonderful that companies like Red Hat and IBM and Canonical and Google
to name just a few that come to my mind right off the top of my head, that they are very
happy to have people who are on their payroll who are working on free software projects and
making a contribution that is very valuable to all of us.
I think that's great.
That's one of the reasons why I think, in turn, if we have a chance to support those companies
by buying their products, that's something we should probably think about doing.
It's not always the case.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle just in the last week or two about the software distribution
that I use, which is known as Kubuntu, and that initial K is the hint that this is the
one that has the KDE desktop, and the fellow named Jonathan, I think Redel is maybe how
it's pronounced, who is a Canonical employee who has been working on that project full
time as part of his job, had to post that, hey guys, I'm not going to be able to do
any more Canonical, no longer things, there's an economic business reason for supporting
my work on this.
Now this turned into, for a few people, the Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu project
over, none of which is true, because what a lot of people didn't realize is the vast majority
of people working on that project, we're not hired by Canonical, and we're not getting
a paycheck.
So where do they get their money?
Well, sometimes they have to come to us and ask for help.
Another thing that we need to take a look at is that free software projects have expenses
of various kinds, it's not just the developers, but you might need to have servers.
And you might need to have that kind of infrastructure that is going to support a project.
And that is going to require raising some money to do all of that.
So I think that those of us who are supporters of free software have to be sensitive to that.
We need to be able to support the software we love.
Now this is something that I've had strong feelings about for a long time, even long
before I was into Linux and free software.
I remember there used to be something called shareware.
It may still exist.
I don't travel in those circles anymore, so I wouldn't know much about it.
But the idea of shareware was that if you were interested in a piece of software written
by an independent developer, they would let you sort of try it before you buy it kind
of thing.
And some of them, it was the honor system, some of them, what you tried was a stripped
down version, and you have to pay it and register it to get all of the features.
But there were always people who thought that shareware meant you didn't have to pay for
something, and would essentially rip off the developers.
I always thought that was pretty sleazy.
And there's something that I was not going to do.
So I registered and paid for any number of shareware programs over the years.
And then when I got into Linux, you know, the general public license, for instance, is
a wonderful thing.
There's nothing the general public license that says, you know, there can never be any
money changing hands.
That's not really what free is about in this context.
So, you know, how are we going to do this?
And I think there's any number of ways you just have to decide you're going to do it
and be sensitive about it.
The first one is if you go to the project's website, and you know, every software project
probably has a website, and oh, by the way, have you noticed companies are not giving away
web hosting in most cases?
So who's paying for the website?
But if you go to the website for a project, very often you are going to see a donate button.
You know, they've tried to make it as easy as possible, hook into PayPal, well, you know,
if it's software you use, and you can afford it, give them a few bucks.
Now, if it's software you don't use, I mean, that's a different thing entirely.
I don't think anyone's under any moral obligation to the support software that they don't personally
use.
But I think if it's stuff that you do use, particularly if it's something you use frequently, you
know, you really ought to help them out.
Now, when I say that, obviously we're not saying make your children go to bed hungry.
But is that really the case for most of the people, particularly in the United States
and Europe, who might be lovers of free software involved with this?
Are they really in a position where they have to choose between feeding their families
and giving a little bit of support to a software project?
I don't think so.
I really don't.
So generally speaking, if it's software I use and I see that donate button, I, you know,
click the button, give them a few bucks.
Now for me, you know, five or ten bucks is not a big deal.
It's pocket money in any event.
So I'm more than happy to do that.
And so if I see the button, I just, I will click on it.
Other things that you can watch out for, you know, I talk about developers, there was
something that I saw recently, you know, I'm mentioning some of the things that I do.
And I want to make clear, it's not because I'm trying to set myself up as being a, you
know, especially wonderful person.
It's just that I'm just giving some examples from my own experience and pointing out it
doesn't have to be a big deal.
You just have to make up your mind.
You're going to do these things and it becomes very easy to do.
So one day, I'm, you know, reading my messages, and I don't remember if there's this email
or on Google Plus or wherever that I saw this, but somewhere I saw a note that, fellow
name, I hope I get his name right, Sebastian Truegh, who is a developer on the KDE project.
And he posted something saying, I need to raise some money if I'm going to keep doing
my work on this.
Now as I've said, I use a KDE distribution.
That KDE desktop is important to me.
So I saw that message and it gave a link and I got there.
There's a donate button, I clicked it and I think it was probably like 10 euros or something
that I gave to him.
Maybe it was $10.
I don't remember what currency it was denominated in.
The number 10 is sort of the magic.
I can just do this without thinking about it thing for me.
So I clicked the button, I gave him a few bucks.
You know, another one, there is a program that I absolutely love.
It's called Miro, M-I-R-O, and it lets me download and then play video podcasts of all
kinds.
I think it's a wonderful project and I get some podcasts like Geekbeat and things like
that.
Hack 5 is a video podcast.
I get these wonderful videos from NASA because I love space.
I think that's all great.
Of course, Ask An Ninja and all of the things like that.
So this is something I actually use every day because I'm always going in there to take
a look at whatever is available, what are the new programs that I can take a look at.
So it's a program I really rely on.
So they had a fundraiser that they were looking for some support to keep the thing going
and they came up with, I thought it was kind of clever, adopt a line of code.
So I thought, okay, so that, I think that looked like $4 a month is what it ended up being
and I thought, okay, yeah, I can do that.
So I now have adopted a line of code and at one point I took a look at the about page
or the about pop up that you get on the software and saw my name listed.
I don't know if I'm still there though, doesn't matter.
I know that I'm supporting them.
The other day, I got another one that's happened to involve DigiCam, which is a photo
organizer in KDE that I use a lot.
So I thought, that's fine.
So again, give them 10 bucks.
Now one that I didn't, I just mentioned it because I happen to see this is cyanogen
mod and I saw this message that they were looking to raise some money to keep it going.
And within a couple of hours, another message came through saying, yep, we've already met
and exceeded all of our fundraising goals, okay.
So that one was pretty popular, they didn't have any trouble raising their money and good
for them.
I wouldn't want them to have any trouble raising their money.
If they were having a little more trouble getting there, I probably would have given them
a few bucks because I'm running cyanogen mod right now on a nook color that I rooted.
A few other things, there was a thing recently for the Debian administrators manual and they
were raising money to get that published and, you know, the distribution I use is based
on Debian.
So again, I thought, you know, give them 10 bucks.
So those are just some of the things that I know that I've done.
But you know, there's other things you can do.
You can start supporting some of these organizations that are out there doing the good fight for
software freedom.
The first one I'm going to mention is the Free Software Foundation.
Now, that's a little more expensive.
That one is, I think $10 a month is what I'm paying for that now.
I'm very proud to be a member of the Free Software Foundation.
I think it's important.
It is the only group I can think of that is just consistently out there fighting for our
freedom in the computing area.
So this is the group that was set up by Richard Stallman and, you know, they were the ones
who came up with the general public license and things like that.
So I'm very happy to be a member and so I'm kicking over $10 a month.
I would have to say we all know Richard Stallman can be rather controversial and I'm well
aware of that.
So you might look at that and say, you know, I don't want to go there.
Well then, there's also the Linux Foundation.
Linux Foundation is, that's Jim Zemlin is the executive director.
You know, Linux Foundation is providing a paycheck to Linus Torvalds, you know.
One of us who are Linux users would have anything to use if it wasn't for Linus.
And recently they just brought in as another fellow, in other words, someone who is on
the payroll, Greg Crow Hartman, who is well known as one of the main kernel hackers and
kernel maintainers.
And so he's now on the payroll there.
So you know, this is another group that I think would be well worth your support.
And that one I think is like $99 a year to be a member of that and many of these, by the
way, have reduced prices if you're a student.
But yeah, that's not obviously not the status that I'm in and it was my hair turns progressively
grayer.
But you know, joining these groups is a good thing.
Another thing you can do to provide some support that you might not be aware of, there's
a group called the software freedom conservancy.
And I learned about it because Bradley Coon, who is the executive director there, was
one of our keynote speakers at Ohio Linux Fest this past year.
And as I've mentioned, I'm the publicity director for Ohio Linux Fest.
So I was involved initially with talking to Bradley about, you know, getting his bio information
and publicizing it.
And that started a nice little conversation.
And you know, I got to hear more about the stuff that he's doing.
And it's a very interesting group.
Now Bradley used to be at the Free Software Foundation and is still pretty well known
as perhaps the major enforcer of the general public license.
So you know, he's very active in promoting that and he loves to talk about that work,
which by the way, mostly involves just writing emails to companies saying, oh, by the way,
you know, you took on an obligation when you used this software, maybe you weren't aware
of this.
He doesn't sue people if it all possible and so far he mostly avoids that.
So now he's the executive director of the software freedom conservancy and what's that
about.
Well, what that is about is the fact that a lot of people, a lot of projects in the
Free Software community, you know, need to raise money, the various kinds, which projects
are we talking about?
Well, here's a few of them.
See if you've heard of any of these, Amarok, very well known as a player of sound, MP3
and AUG and things like that.
So it's a great music program, Git, which is the software that Linus Torvales recently
was instrumental in developing for helping to manage software projects and replacement
for things like subversion.
Samba, that's the software that allows people who want to connect to Windows computers
and Windows servers that allows that connection between Linux and Windows.
So that's very important.
And then line, which is for the people who wish to use Windows software and run that in
a Linux environment, so that's just a few that I think are pretty well known.
And these are all members of the software freedom conservancy.
Well, what does that mean?
The software freedom conservancy basically handles a lot of the stuff for these projects
that they would otherwise have to handle for themselves, such as collecting donations,
keeping bank accounts, you know, filing legal documents, etc.
It does that on behalf of all of these individual projects.
So you could certainly donate to the individual projects through the software freedom conservancy.
And the other thing is that the software freedom conservancy itself is a nonprofit that
is looking for support and I will say on Bradley's behalf that I'm pretty sure they would
be grateful for any donations to help support the work that they do.
So that's another thing you could take a look at.
I think if you take a look at the work the software freedom conservancy does, you agree
that they're doing really good work and they deserve to be supported.
So these are all some of the things that you can do with your hard earned money to help
support free software.
I'm going to mention one other thing that you might not have thought of.
There's something called the Linux Fund.
And the Linux Fund, I think I heard about this initially through Randall Schwartz, the
Pearl programmer who has the podcast Floss Weekly.
And I think he's on the board of directors of this Linux Fund if I recall correctly.
And what they do is they have affinity cards and you may have seen these, you have credit
cards that are tied to, you know, your organization or what have you.
So it's a way of raising money with affinity cards.
If you sign up to get a credit card through them, then the sponsoring group gets a small
cut of every transaction.
So the Linux Fund offers a Linux affinity credit card.
I don't, I think it's master card or visa or one of the major ones like that.
But you know, have a nice little logo on it.
And that's another way that you can support things.
So, you know, here's a, I hope we've given you a lot of different ways that you can
support financially, all of the free software stuff that we know and love.
So I'm going to now do a couple of plugs here.
The first is for Ohio Linux Fest.
We have our call for talks open and we are looking for all sorts of people to come and
give wonderful talks because to tell you the truth, generally speaking, the people who
talk are wonderful.
They may not know that they are, but I've listened to quite a few over the years.
We're looking for a wide variety, right?
So if it's anything involving free and open software, if it's anything involving open
hardware, it doesn't have to be limited to Linux.
In fact, BSD is something that we consider to be important.
We're looking for a wide variety of experience levels.
So we want talks that are for expert system administrators, but we also want talks that
are aimed at newcomers who are just learning about Linux.
So you know, it's pretty much anything that is related to free and open software.
We're going to be interested in.
You know, just submit a talk.
I'm going to put the URL in the show notes for all of that along with the URL of my own
website.
The other thing I want to mention is that Northeast Linux Fest is coming up.
That is on March 17th in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And they are going to have a wonderful program.
Focus is on accessibility.
So if you're going to be in the Massachusetts area, please take a look at dropping by.
And this is a hooker, and I'm signing off.
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