![]() ![]() But on a related note, part of the problem may be that companies push themselves in front of the creative minds when it comes to advertisement. It's even worse when the creator is long dead, but that's a story for a different time. I think it makes more sense to pay the artist to create more of the things that I like rather than paying for a copy (that cost a cent to create) of something they made 20 years ago. I'm not sure if that would also be better for artistic creations, but considering that the service model also seems to work well for Youtube donations (and early access video games) it might work. At least for software, it makes a lot more sense to market the service of creating the software, in my opinion. You just get to use it, and even there you just get to use it exactly how the author wants you to use it. You pay money money for this thing, which doesn't even seem to have any value on its own because value is usually defined by scarcity - this thing is just made scarce artificially - and you don't even get to own it. And not just is it abstract and hard to understand, it also feels unfair. For every other product, you buy it to obtain ownership, but in the case of software you buy it to obtain a license, which is really abstract with most licenses being incomprehensible for most end-users. How can something that's more easily multiplied than water be considered a product? It gets even more confusing when you consider ownership. And of course people don't want to throw money at a company that thinks they can milk infinite cash out of a product that they can duplicate infinitely, who would? Couple that with the fact that piracy from those who couldn't afford to pay for the product anyways doesn't actually cause any loss, and it's obvious that the analogy doesn't make sense. And it's not like we need to support the creators so they can make car2. ![]() Of course people would download cars if we could clone them for free with the click of a button. "Don't steal", "you wouldn't download a car" those messages don't exactly make sense when it comes to digital products. You think "this movie/this video game/this software can be copied over a thousand times in a matter of seconds, so downloading a pirated copy isn't going to hurt anyone", but you don't think "by buying this copy, I'm going to support its creators who can then go on to improve it or make something else that I'll like." And that's probably where the anti-piracy messages go wrong. With traditional marketing, there's a disconnect between the product and the work. That you're enabling them to continue making what you like. So now it's an issue of branding and advertising, I think.Īnd maybe, the reason why SirCmpwn, Krita, Blender (well, that one's a bit of a special case), and the several Youtube channels that are doing fine on Patreon donations is that they emphasize that you're paying them for the work they're doing and not for the product. Donations or subscriptions would work a bit better since users are now paying you to work on improving the software and producing updates (which a simple fork can't do) rather than for the work you've already done (which can be easily duplicated, open source or not), but that won't help if people think that the fork is the official product. So it seems like the creator is less concerned about users not paying him and more about someone making a fork that users can get for free (or perhaps even worse: said forker selling the fork.) And in that case, there's unfortunately not much you can do. Perhaps Aseprite is too niche in comparison to Krita, but then you can still get Aseprite for free since the code is free on Github, you just have to compile it yourself. It certainly used to be true, but I'm not sure if that's still the case. I'm not sure if it's the community or the fact that he works on a bunch of different projects, but given that Krita was able to raise $38,579, we should perhaps re-evaluate the preconception that the open source community (in this case the artist community inside the open source community) is opposed to paying. That's not really that much, but it is surprisingly much for a single open source dev. However, the sway creator (SirCmpwn) is doing surprisingly well having received $5,480 for his sway crowdfund and getting over $500 per month in donations if my math is correct.
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