I know some of you have gone complies FOSS, but I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical. So what are your favorite non-foss apps?
Steam. It is one of the few company’s that still has principles
Because they are not publicly traded, i hope it stays that way
Yeah. Not being legally required to abandon principles in favor of short-term profits for shareholders is tight.
Wow, wow, wow
Wow, wow, wow
I fear the day Gaben isn’t around anymore. Hopefully there is a succession plan for the company to be handed over to someone with similar values.
make a foundation out of it.
Looking at how Valve acted when called out for breaking Australian consumer protection laws I sure as hell hope not!
Valve and Steam have pulled their fair share of shady anti-consumer moves, like the time they violated Aussie and EU consumer protection laws with their refund policy (fucking EA Origin had refunds years before Steam); there have also been allegations of it being a toxic workplace with a trans former employee claiming she was referred to as “it” by her manager.
It also helps that they are essentially a monopoly.
I know that there are technically other game launchers, but that’s always been how monopolies work. They allow a few token “competitors” that they completely control to exist.
Other than steam the only other gamelaunchers/storefronts for pc are:
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EA (Only has EA games in it, which are mostly also on steam)
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Ubisoft (Only has Ubisoft games, also mostly all on steam)
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Epic Games (the only true competitor to steam, and everyone hates them because they aren’t steam)
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GOG (storefront only, I’m pretty sure they literally give you steam keys)
Only ONE of them is a true competitor to steam, Epic Games, and they don’t have anywhere close to the usage steam does. The others are exclusive storefronts (that also have their games sold on steam) or storefronts that sell steam keys.
Steam is so deeply ingrained into the PC gaming space that I’m not sure most gamers understand how devastating it would be to get banned from steam or to have steam go under as a company. Their terms of service in relation to your “ownership” of games are a nightmare, if you get banned from steam your entire library disappears. Poof. Gone. Unrecoverable.
If there were actual alternatives to steam andiwere able to untie my library from them then I would do so in a heartbeat, but as it is my entire games library is trapped in steam and there isn’t really anyway to retrieve it without having multiple terabytes of storage space ready to just hold all of those games at the same time.
GOG does not give out steam keys, you can download all games as ‘stand alone installers’ and don’t need a launcher. You forgot the humble store (which now also comes with a launcher).
Generally agree, but your point about GOG is wrong. Not only can you install games from their platform, its also (to my knowledge) the only storefront where you can get games completely DRM-Free, since you dont need GOG Galaxy to download or install their games
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I think you’ve got a bit of a misconception about FOSS software - you’re allowed to make money selling it, you just also have to provide the source code to any customers! A fair few FOSS apps have free versions on F-Droid but paid versions on the Play store, for example.
Like what?
Simple Mobile Tools (Simple Contacts etc.) cost money for the full version on Play but you can get it for free on F-Droid or GitHub!
free on F-Droid
(minus the video editor from gallery pro)
For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They’re FOSS but they charge money for support.
My fave is Anki, free on Android and 25 USD on i0S for the exact same product.
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D-Sub
Showly (IMDB alternative).
The Showly on F-Droid is not the same as the one on the play store, it says in its description it is a fork.
The play store description says its open source and will be on F-droid soon but I actually did not see it there.
I have the F-Driid version on my phone. I don’t know all the differences with the play store version, but one difference is that you can’t in-app purchase the premium features.
Well, you do not have it from actual F-droid since its not on there: https://search.f-droid.org/?q=Showly&lang=en
You likely have it from the Izzy repo but as I said that one is a fork: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.michaldrabik.showly_oss
Yes, that’s correct. Sorry for the confusion.
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Steam.
A linux client that works, and actually gets fixes, improvements, and features, that is a lot.
Davinci Resolve
Really good video editor, and also, has Linux client.
I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.
Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn’t have a problem with that.
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Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.
On a bigger scale (although they’re not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.
Reaper is an excellent Digital Audio Workstation with full Linux support
I would be really interested in more information about this. Thanks for bringing it to my attention to look into!
Bitwig Studio is more expensive but also has full Linux support and is made by former Ableton devs
Spotify is the only subscription I ever pay, even though I’m an avid pirate and I don’t have any qualms about pirating music, I love the Spotify algorithm so much, it introduces me to new music all the time which is something I love
Paying for it helps me pirate even more efficiently. I often leave 20+ hour playlists on ripping the music I want whilst off doing other things.
I have compared the 320 mp3s I get from it with 320’s that I have bought using spek and they were literally identical and whilst having a flac is nice having money to pay my bills is nicer and the difference in sound quality really isn’t that noticeable without a proper system to play them through.
Well, then you could just use xManager to get pirated Spotify premium. It just doesn’t let you download stuff but if you pirate them separately anyways, then this should work for you. Or are you literally directly ripping the music from Spotify??
I pay for premium for my sister and niece on a family plan thing anyway so it isn’t like I would save any money by not using it as it is there and paid for regardless. I’m literally ripping the music from Spotify using soggfy.
I use soulseek as well which is fine but a lot of idiots on there lock their files away which goes against the very nature of piracy imo, using this Spotify method is often easier to get some of the things I want and then I can tag them using my desired naming convention too rather than having to clean up other peoples messy as fuck tags.
Ah OK, interesting! Well, if you have access to a family subscription this seems like the way to go :)
I mostly use bandcamp + yt-dl to get music (or I actually buy it as well). But it is a bit tedious to import the files into my library…
I am also an avid band camp user and will buy as much as I can afford times being what they are though that is less and less so I have to prioritise what I want to pay for.
The music I am into also releases a lot of things as vinyl only which is utter bullshit IMO so I will pirate the shit out of any of that I can get my hands on as I won’t pay for a giant piece of obsolete media that I then have no way to actually use xD
Bandcamp is really my favorite site to buy or download music. I love just what you said about it, that I can prioritize what I want to pay for :)
Steam and Discord. They are the only non-foss apps that I use basically every single day. I’m trying to wean myself off Discord specifically, but I have so many communities on there that aren’t on FOSS alternatives, and the FOSS alternatives like Matrix chat and such just don’t cut it for me yet.
Plus literally all my friends I game with and chat with are on Discord and almost none of them are even slightly interested in migrating anywhere else.
Obsidian. Silver Bullet is a FOSS alternative, but I’m not sure if they do toggles or something that works like it. And I really like my toggle-like functionality. I happily use callouts to simulate toggles in Obsidian.
Joplin is another FOSS alternative to Obsidian. I’ve been using it for years; it let’s you encrypt your notes in place so they can’t be read without the client having the password to access them.
Obsidian stores everything as regular markdown files so even if it disappears out of existence one day the files will still be usable. I personally use cryptomator to encrypt my sensitive obsidian vault. And use syncthing to sync the other vault between devices.
I guess foobar2000 is non-foss as it’s free but not open source.
Strawberry is a good drop-in replacement for foobar2000.
I’ll second Strawberry. I loved foobar and was worried about losing it when I migrated to linux, but I found Strawberry and it looks and functions just the way I liked foobar.
Isn’t Strawberry a fork of Clementine? I was using Clementine for years before I realized it had been abandoned, and unfortunately Strawberry doesn’t have any podcast support. Iirc they don’t have any intention of supporting podcasts either so for me at least it doesn’t truly fill the void.
It is, and Clementine was a fork of KDE’s Amarok 1.4. No plans to support podcasts unfortunately but there is streaming support.
There’s also DeaDBeeF, which has more UI customization available as far as I can tell.
Obsidian for my journaling and note-taking needs, The Storygraph for tracking my reading.
Scrivener is still the absolute best word processor for ginormous writing projects. There are FOSS projects that do some parts of it right, but fall far behind in the others. It’s particularly frustrating because my usual FOSS approach would be to use other tools that make up for the inadequacies, but Scrivener pretty much nails the “what to include and what to leave out” equation. It’s a great combo of a word processor, project management tool and a research/notes tool, all rolled into one.
I don’t have much experience with Scrivener, but it came up when I was looking for writing software, and clearly it’s very popular.
The reasons I ended up rejecting it were, mainly, lack of Android and Chromebook/Linux support and lacking sync capabilities (looks like there’s Dropbox and iTunes sync support now). The pricetag seems reasonable, though.
After a lot of searching, I ended up with Obsidian, and love it to bits. It syncs flawlessly from my Mac desktop to my Android phone and my Chromebook, it has a superb plugin development community, and seems to be able to do almost everything Scrivener does, but for free.
@renard_roux @foss Do you know if it can output in Shun mamuscript format with a plugin?
I’m not sure about direct Shunn / Standard Manuscript Format export, but essayist Jamie Todd Rubin has a great serie of articles about going paperless with Obsidian , and episode 25 has a workflow specifically for this (using Pandoc externally to compile).
I’m happy with Affinity Photo as a cheaper, non-subscription Photoshop clone.
Never managed with GIMP :(
Maybe try Krita if you want a FOSS image editor. It’s good enough for my needs at least.
Wanting to make money from your app doesn’t prevent you from making it foss, therefore I have no favourite proprietary apps
Sublime Text!
Sublime Merge for me.
