Yeah man, Debian has no future. Food ain't free, someone get them a robust monetisation scheme, a corporate sponsor! Otherwise they'll stagnate. No idea how they managed to hold on for 30 years without any of that, the poor fellows. /s
I actually wrote two long ass responses to this but lemmy bugs caused both of them to be deleted before I could hit send. Good thing, actually, because I can summarize them in a paragraph. EDIT: well nvm, I ended up typing an equally long one all over again....
Lichess, Stockfish, Tachiyomi, and in the world of Linux, Debian; all these are proudly open-source, proudly non-commercial, going nowhere any time soon, and no corporate daddy. To commercialize itself or seek a profit motive would be completely against lichess' purpose, and it's the darling of the chess community - not likely to disappear one fine day, is it now?
Sure, open-source projects can monetize and there's nothing wrong with that - that's down to the ethos of each individual project. But for so many of these projects, doing exactly what you're suggesting would be completely antithetical to their culture and ethos, even their purpose of existing!
I'm just so tired of this "only corporations and self-interested motives will get us anywhere" attitude. It's so fundamentally blind, so disrespectful to the ingenuity of the human spirit and its desire to strive for the common good. The fact is, many strong and robust projects which have contributed to the good of humankind and are more than just "decent" exist, for no other reason than someone simply wanting to write something cool, or make the world a better place. And they will continue on for a long time, for those same reasons.
I did not expect to read some nonsense that sounds like it came out of a 90's era Microsoft executive's mouth (complete with "food is not free", my god) on lemmy. I expected to read it even less on the piracy community. Steve Ballmer, is that you?
I just finished reading a manga that was translated by random people from a certain anonymous cloverleaf website, for no other reason than they wanted to - not for money, not even to have their names attached to the damn thing, because they're identified only as "anon".
The view of the world put forth in this comment denies that what I just experienced is even possible, sticks its fingers in its ears and tries its best to ignore some of humanity's best work (because acknowledging it would be fatal to the central hypothesis). All to insist that selfishness is the best way forward and that we need the powerful and mighty, the vagaries of money, to give us lemmings purpose in life. It is just such a profoundly sad, empty way of looking at life, I genuinely don't know what to say...
There are some people that I consider true heroes, and Aaron Swartz is among the foremost. Rest in peace.