Re: [GNU-linux-libre] now that adbard is gone :^( the ad problem is back

[Jaromil]

re all,

ok, at the risk of going a bit OT, I'll try to outline what comes
after 12 years of "living clean and let your work be seen" for those
who have not much money to live, nor want to become money rich in
their life, rather than dedicate it to sharing knowledge and free and
open source software.  I'll invest more of my time in a longer article
about the topic and this thread is an interesting contribution to it.

On Thu, 29 Mar 2012, Nicolás Reynolds wrote:

> hi, just 0 cents: at parabola we haven't been accepting money
> donations, but people's time, and hosting space nor bandwidth have
> never been a real problem... never needed money i mean. maybe we can
> help you with this?

It is not so simple what you are mentioning: it seems so if you just
boil it down to "host a website", but this is not exactly what it is.

We are talking about a tribe relying on the interconnection of diverse
services used and administered by different people, which also implies
a network of trust regarding private materials hosted on a somehow
intertwined server fleet and long-term personal relationships built
across members taking care of it.

And while at the beginning of 2000, about ten years ago, we had a
similar situation as yours, mostly thanks of public infrastructure and
academic support in EU, the situation is now changing for dyne.org. EU
is diving deep into depression, while the attempt of healing the
problems brought by neo-liberism with an insane injection of
ultra-liberism has the effect of shutting down most cultural funding.

For example, the public institutions where I've worked part-time in
the past 6 years ( http://NIMk.nl ) had an 100% cut and we are all
fired now. Being a software developer myself (not just a distro maker,
which strangely enough might be somehow more rewarding as an activity
alone) I've brought forward some free software development you can see
here http://syncstarter.org and that I'm at least happy it won't sink
with the ship now, being free and open source and fairly well done.

Our infrastructure had to slowly be bought commercially, expenses are
now about 100 EUR p/m and there is no way we can find gratuitous
hosting in a company where some of us works as we also did in the
past, because of the heavier traffic and because most people now work
in multinational corporations, rather than a small local business, and
these corporations usually like to support "big fishes" like Mozilla,
not us.

So far I have devolved part of my regular 900 EUR p/m income from
part-time work in dyne.org, plus gigs and workshops as well, to make
it survive. Since I've never spent time asking a lot, very few others
have done so. But, back to personal, I am going to face financial
problems soon and for sure cannot maintain this expensive hobby
anymore, in case it stays as an hobby.

While aging myself and being forced to abandon squatting houses (we
face years of imprisonment for that now) my life-costs have slowly
grown from 0 to 200 EUR p/m to a 500 EUR p/m now (private health
insurance is also mandatory in NL, etc..)

AdBard and now Google ads definitely help to make the hobby
sustainable in this difficult phase, despite the fact I also hate
advertisement - but then honestly, even more than advertisement I hate
marketing of industrially made global gadgets, something that supports
sweat-shop in-human labor and huge amounts of oil to fly it around the
world.

Now I am not sure we have a picture of what means coding free and open
source software in terms of sustainability, but nowadays if there
would be a labour union to protect the rights of redistributed
upstream developers, then I would spend my last cents into it.

What I'd love to come out of this very useful discussion are concrete
proposals on how to avoid proprietary software ads (via Google or a
revived AdBard that actually works) as well ideas and visions on how
to support our development.

Thanks for reading and offering your help already, but with all what
I've written I don't think InI need help. Its not help what's needed,
but definitely some constructive input and from the FSF as well. In
two close threads now we have read the advice to "put a link to the
FSF websidesite" (which BTW centralizes the donation flow, already
very centralized and not redistributed) and also "remove your ads"...

looking forward to more constructive suggestions

happy hacking!


> libertad!



-- 
jaromil,  dyne.org developer,  http://jaromil.dyne.org
GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39

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