i don’t defend targeted ads since they are bad (i use uBlock)
but what monetization system is a bit more ethical than targeted ads but can last unlike donations
how would you solve that issue
My Opinion
well it is make that there are version which you own but if you pay for 1 the one after it you pay again for that new version but with a small discount
The code might be open source, but the infrastructure it runs on needs to be paid for somehow
Yep. I took OP’s question to be about big tech. If business isn’t using it, you can’t get too big.
Look at MS and all the people around here predicting their downfall because they personally switched to Linux and the Xbox division is suffering. Y’all, 85-90% of Microsoft’s profits are corporate Windows and Office. The rest is fluff. LOL, they long ago dropped resistance to pirating and I’ve paid them zero pennies over 30-years of using Windows for personal use.
On infra though, we sysadmins had predicted another wave of business bringing compute and storage back inhouse. Despite the stunning charges from AWS and the like, that doesn’t look to ever happen. Wierd.
Yeah, subscriptions and donations would have to be more than what is now. But distributed and federated systems and not chasing profitability at corporations would go a long way to running systems. Lemmy for example can be an alternative to Reddit while running off of hobbyist and donarion run servers. Gmail probably costs a fortune but what about 100,000 small independent email servers taking its place? Email is already a federated system. And then there’s self hosting. I bought a second hand computer and run the equivalent of Google Photos for myself and others on it for very cheap. Putting all these together, and if these were the default and more supported, the infrastructure costs can be spread thin.