I don’t usually purchase any Windows software as I am a “Linux” guy. I guess it makes sense as most Windows software packages wouldn’t work on your distribution even with a lot of prayers and the most current version of Wine (“Wine Is Not an Emulator”).
I say “usually purchase” because there are a few tasks that I cannot yet perform on Linux but I am trying to get past those issues.
Windows hasn’t always been the perfect operating system that it is today with Windows 10, arguably it isn’t all that perfect right now in my personal opinion. I remember the “Windows XP” years where I had to purchase some utilities and other software packages to round out my computing experience. I was fairly happy until I had to upgrade to Windows 7 as not everything I had purchased was still working after the upgrade.
I was initially a bit upset that that this or that fabulous little shareware software needed to be either repurchased or replaced by something else. It didn’t take me too long before I realized that if I was a representative user then the income stream then most of those developers were going to die of hunger. I saw a similar rant about this from a developer who used the Ubuntu software center – https://youtu.be/SMKeWTVYBUo?t=1249
The free market works because it sends signals to companies providing goods or services. The companies selling products that are really desired get voted up (with money) which allows them to stay in business and expanse while the poor performers eventually go out of business.
I remember all of that from my economics class but I don’t remember them speaking at all about how open source software development models fit into the rest of economy. The answer is that it works in a similar fashion – companies or people need resources to continue.
These resources might be money, hardware or talented individuals to help out with any of the tasks related to the development and shipping of software.
Help to support your favorite organizations
The number of good companies to support is without end so I can only list some of the bigger ones that impact most of us every day. This list covers just a few of the big open source players.
- Debian Linux
- Mozilla foundation
- Electronic frontier foundation
- Gimp
- Libre office / Open office
- Linux Magazine
- Wine
To help keep open source strong we all need to try and support our favorite organizations.
Some of these organizations help us process our data while others inform us of what is happening in our world or even provide computers with our favorite operating systems. This support might be in the form of time, talent or treasure.
It isn’t important that we all support the exact same organizations but that we support the ones that make a difference to each of us.
