This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is why on principle I almost 99.99% refuse to invest time or money in any app or service that is an ongoing cost that can be taken away or enshittified.
It needs to not collect data, have a single purchase (or yearly feature update subscriptions that don't affect the underlying functionality that is permanently available to me as a user) and if there's any doubt about that I'm looking for the next, more permanent solution + negative review for enshittifiers
KDE Plasma recently added a once-annually notification requesting donations to the KDE e.V. (who pay for things like server infrastructure to support the project). Is this past your line, or acceptable?
I can handle that.
What if it weren't a donation? What if the situation were a once annual subscription where your use of the software is reliant on that subscription cost?
Yes, I realize KDE is still open source, but what if they did this anyways?
Then thats a no. I'm not getting anything embedded in my workflow that can randomly decide it can't work because the mother-ship is down or the business model needs to change.
Ideally speaking: totally not cool
Realistically speaking: they got solid stuff going, and plus you can disable it one way or another
Idealistically and realistically: Totally and absolutely cool. If anything, they have a moral imperative to keep the project going, since there are users that depend on it, and doing that requires money. As such, people will need to be informed of how to contribute, so a pop up doing just that is a good way to achieve this. Why would this not be ok, even idealistically?
There was an iOS app I used like this that did a great job of scanning text books.
After I used it for about 6 months this exact thing happened. Started charging fees for many different things.
Exporting images as pdf had a charge, then scanning to make the text searchable had a fee.
I just exported as jpg and used imagic and ocrmypdf to take care of this.
Then I learned that iOS has a built in scanner in the files app, so I just switched to that one.
Yep, one free and one paid app I have used for a while recently moved previously entitled functionality behind subscription paywalls. Serves me right. Will stick to libre apps from here and suffer that way instead.
If it is not open source, and you are not paying, someone else is and you are the product.
Bonus: You could be paying and be the product anyway.
See: Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc etc
I was able to talk my org into leaving Meetup for the same reasons. It's just progressively getting worse, advertising to our users while simultaneously raising fees. Removing the ability to sync calendars. They also won't give us the email addresses of any of our users unless we upgrade to "pro" (for an additional fee, of course), and even then, only the ones who RSVP to our events.
Raising fees is one thing, but doing so while removing features and adding just blatant irrelevant advertisements aint gonna work for me.
This is a great post. Additionally, if the exploitation isn't occurring in a ramp up of costs to use basic functions of the service, it's definitely occurring somewhere else and likely at the expense of your privacy.
