Thank God … I’ve been on Gimp and Scribus for the past 15 years, mainly because I could never afford Adobe products for the little bit of work I needed them for.

I was open source a long time ago because I just couldn’t afford paying for stuff for the little time I needed software. Now I’m happy to be fully open source and even contribute with donations to the projects I like the most. I donate annually now to projects like Wikipedia, Libreoffice, Scribus and Fediverse developers and projects.

This is one criticism I’ll always have with open source supporters … if you want open source alternatives, contribute with donations to them. Give anything you can afford … $1, $2, $10 … because they need money to survive and stay engaged and committed to their project.

If we all just stand aside and take advantage of free open software and not give anything, then we are no better than the corporations we were trying to avoid. Instead of corporations taking advantage of us, we are taking advantage of developers.

So if you want these open projects to live and survive, contribute to them with whatever you got. If we all just gave a dollar each to these projects, no matter what they are, the developers would have more than enough to maintain their work.

And whatever you contribute, it will be far less than the hundreds of dollars annually you would have given to a big corporation that would have just counted your money as profit and not directly contribute or support the actual developers.