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I mean, it's not like either the GNU manifesto nor the OSD have ever said you can't charge money for the software, just that you can't prevent others from getting at the source of what they've bought, or hacking on that source, or sharing their hacks with others. It's been a meme for as long as as I can remember that Free Software is free as in free speech, not free as in free beer.
Honestly, you could argue this tactic is a good thing. With the various open source projects hurting for funding, perhaps more of them should start distributing officially supported builds via Steam and other online stores for a small fee to help fund their efforts.
With the various open source projects hurting for funding, perhaps more of them should start distributing officially supported builds via Steam and other online stores for a small fee to help fund their efforts.
Mindustry and Aseprite are also available for sale on Steam, or for free through your favorite package manager. I agree it's a handy way to throw the devs a few bucks if you're so inclined.
Krita started doing this a long time ago as an simple fundraising initiative (a lot of people have a lower threshold for clicking a button in steam than entering their credit card details on some obscure donation website).
The Krita people are a bit spergy at times, but more often than not they're objectively correct (e. g. the qt6 debacle) with their heart in the right place.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that QT6 is dropping X11 support and going wayland-only. But that's only a guess and would be only part of a debacle.
Another piece on Omarchy: Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH (archive)
Among other things, mentions Andreas Kling (of Ladybrid fame), Vaxry (of Hyprland) and KiwiFarms (a forum whose harassment campaigns have been linked to multiple suicides.). Advocates for boycotts of every company/person that tainted themselves with supporting Omarchy.
And plugs FOSS's favorite pedo's latest article.
Several things, first big one was the LTS licensing issue, and then them dropping a bunch of stuff for qt 6.0 and generally providing a poorer/more difficult/less well-documented upgrade path than what qt developers are used to, especially for the graphics/opengl APIs (it took a long time to port Krita to qt6).
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that QT6 is dropping X11 support and going wayland-only. But that's only a guess and would be only part of a debacle.
Krita started doing this a long time ago as an simple fundraising initiative (a lot of people have a lower threshold for clicking a button in steam than entering their credit card details on some obscure donation website).
The Krita people are a bit spergy at times, but more often than not they're objectively correct (e. g. the qt6 debacle) with their heart in the right place.
There's nothing wrong with charging money for free software. It's free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.
Free software is about user freedom to run, study, modify, and share the code. Charging for distribution, support, or hosted instances is actually fully aligned with the philosophy.
