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Why 'free' proprietary software will always end in tears
(davelane.nz)
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?
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?