Comment on Do we know how much apps would cost if we had to replace as revenue with subscription fees?
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
We don’t have to talk in hypotheticals. Mastodon is free. Signal is free. Linux is free. The cost is zero. Yes they all get money from donations and from commercial contracts, but it’s absolutely possible to run services like these without squeezing every last pfennig out of every user.
Linux is subsidized by a consortium of major tech companies supporting a common code base as it is cheaper than relying on one vendor.
Signal is run by a non-profit group which is funded by various grants.
Mastodon is a combination of above, the code being subsidized by a consortium of developers and individual servers funded by various means.
To just say “it is free” ignores the economics of why they are free.
otp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
The cost of those to the service provider is generally not zero though. And cost is per user, and these all have fewer users than mainstream social media and “services”.
Though Linux is an exception here, with it costing only the time of hobbyists (at least as far as I know)
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 1 day ago
Linux actually has a lot of people that get paid to work on it, especially nitty-gritty stuff like the kernel and drivers. Lots of multi-billion dollar companies rely on that stuff, so they often have some of their employees work some or even all of their working hours on FOSS.
Linus Torvalds himself is an employee of Red Hat.
Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
You asked how much it would cost to use. The existence of these smaller services proves that the answer can be as low as free, if someone wants a thing to exist and is willing to cover the cost of hosting it (which can be as low as buying a Raspberry Pi, assuming you already have internet).
otp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Fair!