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Making Living
See also how to live, homelessness etc.
The subject of how to make the ends meet by making something which is
to be shared gratis and without limitations is
one of the top question asked in the "FOSS"/free culture circles, given we live in an
ultracapitalist dystopian system punishing
any attempt at selflessness. Many newcomers
even believe it's completely impossible, even though there are many
people making living with FOSS, albeit ways of doing so are perhaps more
challenging than those of proprietary
products, and, importantly to us, pose very high
"ethical" challenges, i.e. even if money can be made, it's extremely
hard to make them in ethical ways (considering that the very concept of
money is unethical for example).
Firstly let's make it clear that money and
trade as such are unethical, period. In an ideal world there'd be none of it,
but in today's world we may be forced to engage in the unethical system
at least to some degree, and this article is here to give advice on
finding the least harmful way. If you can somehow live without money and
trade, you should, but we know it's nearly impossible today and that
many of those who could are still searching for a "middle way" between
the ethical and the comfortable. So let's just keep this in back of our
minds.
Similarly: one has to be constantly aware that money and commercialization always bring a high risk
of profit becoming the highest priority (which is a "feature"
hard-wired in capitalism) which will
compromise the quality and ethics of the produced work. Profiting
specifically requires abusing someone else, taking something away from
someone. Making money on donations often stands on being popular and
being popular often means self censorship, hypocrisy and populism.
Therefore it is ideal to create LRS on a
completely voluntary basis, for free, in the creator's spare
time. This may be difficult to do but one can choose a
lifestyle that minimizes expenses (even homelessness) and therefore also time needed
to spend at work, which will give more free time
for the creation of LRS. This includes living
frugally, not consuming hardware and rather reusing old machines, making savings, not spending on
unnecessary things such as smoking or fashion etc. And of course, if you
can't make LRS full-time, you can still find relatively ethical ways of
it supporting you and so, again, giving you a little more freedom and
resources for creating it.
Also if you can somehow rip off a rich corporation and get some money for yourself
(preferably legally), it's probably a good idea. Remember, corporations
aren't people, they can't feel pain, they probably won't even notice
their loss and even if you hurt them, you help the society by hurting
the Satan. The only thing to watch for is to not commit a provable
crime, fraud and theft is better to be avoided, but for example a
destructive lawsuit for psychological harm or something is cool.
Is programming software the only way to make money with
LRS? No, you can do anything related to LRS and you don't even
have to know programming. You can create free art such as game
assets or writings, you can educate, write articles etc.
Making Money With "FOSS"
For inspiration we can take a look at traditional ways of making
money in FOSS, even if a lot of them may be unacceptable for us as the
business of the big FOSS is many times not so much different from the
business of big tech corporations.
With "open source" it is relatively easy
to make money and earn salary as it has become quite successful on the
market (though by sacrificing focus on freedom exactly to be able to
make money better) -- the simplest way is to simply get a job at some
company making open source software such as Mozilla, Blender etc.
However the ethics of the open source business
is quite questionable, in great many cases it's just as harmful as the
proprietary industry, "open source" is often nothing more than a brand
nowadays. Even though open source technically respects the rules of free software licenses, it has (due to its
abandonment of ethics) found ways to abuse people in certain ways, e.g.
by being a capitalist software.
Therefore open source software is not really LRS
and we consider this way of making money rather harmful to others.
Working for free software
organizations such as the FSF is probably a better
way of making living, even though still not perfect: FSF has been facing
some criticism of growing corruption and from the LRS point of view they do not address many issues of
software such as bloat, public domain etc.
Way Of Making Money With LRS
Considering all things mentioned above, here are some concrete things
of making money with LRS. Keep in mind that a lot of services (PayPal,
Patreon etc.) listed here may possibly be proprietary and unethical, so always check
them out and consider free alternatives such as Liberapay. The methods are following:
- donations: You may ask
for donations on your website or "Patreon" like sites (people often ask
for cryptocurrencies, traditional money via
services like Liberapay, PayPal, Buy Me a
Coffee or even direct bank transfer or sending checks, which may be the
"ethically" best option). For significant earnings you need to be
somewhat popular because people donate scarcely, but if your work is
good, there sometimes appears a generous donor who sends you a lot of
money ({Happened to me a few times. I hereby thank all those kind people
<3 ~drummyfish}). It can help if you create "content" such as
programming videos alongside your project to get some "following", but
it may also distract you and take away some of your energy. "Content
creation" is bullshit but it you have to do
it, prefer quality over quantity. People like Luke Smith seem to make quite some big money
like this. There is also the option of creating free-licensed content
(tutorials, vlogs, streams, podcasts, ...) but giving some advantages to
subscribes, for example earlier access (subscribers get videos
immediately, others get a public CC0 video with some delay), shoutouts
and names in credits, access to exclusive community forums, ability to
affect and take part in your creations (vote on topics, chat with you,
play games with you, ...) or even something "extra but proprietary"
(non-free higher resolution assets, behind the scenes videos, ...) --
there are compromises here in that you treat people unequally and
possibly create a little bit of proprietary content, but in the end you
can make it so that most of what you do will be free, public domain
stuff for everyone. A lot of free culture
artists are successful in creating free art this way, even completely public domain, for example Kenney (the
number one creator at opengameart). If you are
really good at what you do and decide to share freely, the freedom
lovers WILL spot you and appreciate your effort as it's still the case
most free works out there are sadly super amateur.
- selling services: Like with merchandise, selling
services is normally not considered unethical, so it's at least better
than selling licenses. The services can include for instance running a
server with LRS software with paid accounts (or
maybe have "gratis" and "premium"), offering maintenance/configuration
of someone else's servers or providing advice, tutoring, consulting and
education. This can also in turn supports the development of the
software in question and helps you get paid. As of 2020s online tutoring
seems like a pretty viable way of securing living, however one may have
to resort to proprietary software for communication with the
customers.
- crowd funding: A
method similar to donations but a little more "encouraging" for the
donors. You set a financial goal and if enough people donate to reach
that goal, you get the money and create the project. Patreon and
Kickstarter are typically used for this. Open consoles like Arduboy and Pokitto are
examples of FOSS projects founded like this. Disadvantage is you have to
reach some kind of popularity and respect rules of the funding
platforms, so you'll have to sell part of your soul, will have to censor
yourself, do "marketing" etc., so it may
actually suck. Once you raise the funds there is also a big pressure to
deliver. A slightly better alternative may be so called "ransom
model" in which you first make the game, show it off, and
promise to release it only when you get some money -- here you remove
the pressure and possibility of not delivering.
- pay what you
want: Here you create the work and then offer a download
with optional payment, typically with some suggested price. People who
can't afford to pay don't have to. This method has the advantage of not
putting you under stress of a deadline like the crowd funding method,
also you just don't have to care much about sucking someone's... ehm,
you know. Sites like itch.io are friendly
to this option, but don't expect this to make you much.
- finding a sponsor/patron: If you're good as in
REALLY good and work on something very valuable, you may be able to find
a rich guy to pay you just for doing it, however there's the danger of
the sponsor buying some form of control over what you do, he may want to
insert ads to your software etc., and that's
not very good. To find a sponsor you probably have to very actively ASK
for it, keep sending hundreds of mails to many rich people.
- selling physical products, hardware and merchandise ("merch"): This method makes
use of the fact that selling physical items is considered less (even
though not completely!) unethical, unlike selling copies of information. So you can e.g. create a free video game and
then sell T-shirts or coffee mugs with that video game's themes. You may
write a public domain book and then sell physical printed books (of
course, others will be able to sell your book too), manuals for your
software and so on. In the past some GNU/Linux distros used to sell their systems on nice
"officials" CDs, but nowadays CDs are kind of dead. Open consoles kind of do this as well, they
create FOSS games and tools and then sell hardware
that runs these games.
- You can specifically make use of the advantages of
LRS and get some company to pay you. For example an open console creator will be highly
interested in an engine for 3D games that will run on very low-spec
embedded hardware because that will increase interest in their product.
Existing FOSS engines, even the lightweight ones, are bloated and won't run on such hardware, however LRS
ones, such as small3dlib, will. Even if the
company doesn't pay you directly, they might at least send you their
product for free ({I got some open consoles for free for porting Anarch to them. ~drummyfish}). Then it's not really
making living anymore, but yeah...
- selling on proprietary sites (CONTROVERSIAL): This
may not be acceptable to everyone, but it can be possible to create a
free work and then distribute it under free conditions in some places and
simultaneously sell this item in places distributing proprietary assets. E.g. one may create a 3D
model and put it under a free license on opengameart while also selling it in 3D models stores
like TurboSquid -- this will make the model available for everyone as
free but will make people who don't bother to search the free sites pay
for it. This may potentially bring much more money than the other
methods as the proprietary stores have big traffic and people there are
specifically willing to spend money. However, this supports the intellectual property business.
Important note: read the terms&condition of the
proprietary site, it may for example be illegal for you to share your
assets elsewhere if the proprietary site makes you sign an
exclusive deal for them. {I am actually guilty of this, been selling
some small 3D models on TurboSquid. It provides a kind of stable
mini-income of about $3/month. ~drummyfish}
- non-profit: It is
possible to run a non-profit organization that creates software (or hardware or whatever) for public
benefit -- details differ by each country but a non-profit may receive
funding from the state and be exempted from taxes. Check out EU grants etc. This method may however require a lot of
effort (as running an organization is much more difficult than setting a
donation website) and may potentially be limiting in some ways
(governments may have condition for the funding etc.).
- abuse state and your employer: You may at least
temporarily avoid work by e.g. registering as
unemployed and living on welfare (possibly combined with your saved
money), getting some kind of disability pension (pretend you're autist
or something) or by getting employed somewhere and becoming "sick" (give
something to your doctor so he gives you a sick paper -- if you're a woman you may for example suck his dick). Do this
every few months.
- ...
See Also
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