Re: A mathematical, non-corruptable, algorithmic, democratic and free system of government and society

[Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support>]

* Andrew Yu via libreplanet-discuss <libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org> [2022-01-12 23:59]:
> Funding has always been an issue with free software.

No, not always, I did not get that as personal impression. In fact my
first encounter with free software was that I have paid for it, and
continued paying for quite some time. Majority of companies in Germany
and generally in European countries marketed GNU/Linux CD/DVD ROMs and
later other operating systems. We were paying for books like 100
German marks which included GNU/Linux on CD-ROM. Today there are many
free software projects which sell their services or otherwise profit
from free software as service providers, example is Amazon, Digital
Ocean, and plethora of hosting providers. Free software runs Internet,
that is fact, and funding comes from its usage and provision, thus
direct and indirect sales. Red Hat is still there
https://www.redhat.com/en and OpenSUSE https://www.opensuse.org and I
can just guess many other companies are still on market making quite a
bunch of money, thus getting the funding, and also contributing back
to Free Software, such as contributing to kernel and various other
programs. 

> If people can get it for gratis, non only the people who can't
> afford paying (which includes a student like me, sadly) won't pay,
> the others who can afford it are just too lazy to donate.  

People like you and many others undergo various changes in their
life. While I did pay first time for free software, and kept paying
for it, that was because I was in the same time awarded with quality
printed manuals, real books, and the whole package looked magically
good. And in reality it was better than good as compared to how much
money and time and effort I have wasted on broken Windoze. But then
later I have not paid anything apart Internet for long time, I have
been downloading it and updating through Internet. Then again I came
to stage where I could donate to free software projects, and so I did.

Yes, sometimes you will not be able to pay. But sometimes you will pay
either in the form of money, or in the form of your own free software
projects. Payment is not only money. Contributions, bugs, discussions,
initiatives, speeches, there are many forms of "payments".

> It's probably worse in China: donations aren't in the culture.

Sales are in the culture in China, so just sell free software.

> I can't say much about office suites because I don't use them, not
> even the free ones because I use Groff and TeX.

Recently for many documents I am using Asciidoctor and Asciidoctor
PDF:

Asciidoctor | A fast, open source text processor and publishing toolchain for converting AsciiDoc content to HTML5, DocBook, PDF, and other formats.
https://asciidoctor.org/

asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf: Asciidoctor PDF: A native PDF converter for AsciiDoc based on Asciidoctor and Prawn, written entirely in Ruby:
https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf/#themes

Asciidoctor Example
https://jianmin.dev/asciidoctor-example/

Using AsciiDoc and Asciidoctor to write documentation - Tutorial
https://www.vogella.com/tutorials/AsciiDoc/article.html


Jean

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