Yeah paying a sub isn't a good model either. They're both kinda old-media models shoehorned into the web where they don't really fit.
Donation models are cool, so long as you've got a userbase who (enough of whom at least) will pay. And so long as you let people who don't donate see everything (otherwise it's just subs under a different name).
The crop of free-to-play games of late are kinda interesting (the ones that are genuinely free-to-play, that is, rather than pay-to-win). Making your service free but selling vanity/convenience items. Although applying that to a website takes us into Delphi territory.
Someone with more clevers than me once said, "go ahead and use this service for free, it doesn't really cost me much if you do, and I'm happy to help people when I can."
It was me. Multiple times.
And no doubt plenty of other people too.
Not everyone on earth is a money-hungry selfish twat.
Firstly there's something which may provide a valuable service but isn't easy to put a financial value on.
Secondly you could run it as an old-fashioned 'business'. i.e. you make enough to live on and reinvest the rest into the service. Operating more like a tradesman than a businessman. Simply providing a service and getting recompensed for doing so. Not looking to make profit.
Also I think we have to realise that the little sites help the big sites. The greater the diversity and usefulness of the web, the more potential 'paying' customers the big sites have. So while something may not have a direct financial payoff for the people who run the site (or whatever), it all contributes to a healthier and more prosperous internet overall.
Operating more like a tradesman than a businessman.
There's someone who hasn't paid a plumber recently ;)
Seriously though, I don't disagree with you but I think in your eyes I'm probably a dirty capitalist so we're unlikely to reconcile our views. As far as I'm concerned I get a fairly solid stable service completely free, knowing that the whole thing costs staggering amounts of money to keep going.
They have to break even if they're running it as a traditional business, yeah. But that's not the only way. Cannonical (the company behind) Ubuntu is a good example. Founded by a millionaire as a loss-making venture to create and distribute a usable desktop linux distro (partly) so that people in developing countries are on a more level playing field with the rest of the world. Something was put before money.
Wikipedia is another example. Someone just wanted to create a free, crowd sourced, encyclopaedia and... did it. Making enough money to keep it running was a secondary concern and it exists on donations. But the important/interesting thing is that you have tens of millions of articles created by people donating their labour for free.
You are indeed a dirty capitalist. If I was king of the world I'd just make profit illegal. You can pay yourself what you want, you can reinvest what you want, but any liquid assets you or your business have in the bank at the end of each year get taken into my treasury to spend as I see fit :Y
But should these things really be run at a loss? When looking at Cannonical I like that it is free and there's no visible ads or any sort of knowing outlay of any sort, but surely most FOSS stuff is purely from the good of peoples hearts.
Life unfortunately runs on money and not good intentions.
I suppose the circular argument goes that money only exists because we want it to exist, but I don't genuinely think humans will ever get to that point.
Life currently runs on money, sure. But that'll change. Money is such bullshit now anyway. Can you even describe what money is?
But yeah, people have to eat. And that means getting paid. But there's a big difference between getting paid and monetising the shit out of everything you touch. There's a difference between making a living doing something which improves the world around you and profiteering through artificial restrictions.
FOSS is interesting in that while a lot of the work on most things is done by people volunteering their labour, most of the work on the big projects (the kernel, x.org etc.) is paid-for. Redhat are a good real-world-business example, they employ lots of people to work on various FOSS projects (notably the kernel) to ensure that they have the highest quality product available which can run on a lot of shit. In doing this they also, of course, make every other linux distro better (i.e. they help their 'competition'). And then they give their product away for free.
And yet their growth is staggering and, as I say, they're making a fucklot of money selling support for that product to big business. Part of what enables them to do this successfully is the fact that their shareholders recieve dividends based on market share rather than on profit. So there's a vested interest to be the best rather than to do the bare minimum and charge as much as possible for it.
I think they're a really good example of how... money doesn't have to come first in everything in order to make a lot of money. You can do a lot of good along the way if you want to
We've only had money for about 5000 years of our 200000 years of existence. And it could be argues that we've had money in the modern sense for a far shorter time. Money represents a very particular way of looking at property and ownership which is really quite arbitrary. Even something as recent as Roman society had very different notions of property.
We're at a point where many of the cultural artefacts we can create (anything coded like games and apps, movies, music, books and 'knowledge/information' in general) are infinitely reproducible and distributable at essentially no cost, and it's pretty obvious that post-enlightenment notions of property, ownership and authorship are wearing a bit thin.
We also have many Commons - things which are percieved to have be generally (whether monetarily or not) beneficial to society - things like roads, parks, schools, libraries etc. which are not run for profit. Why not a social networking site and a search engine?
I do always wonder how the big distros manage to stay alive without millionaires pumping money into them, and I guess with RedHat they have got into a position where they can offer support which generates enough money to make sure the software continues to prosper.
Well there's Debian at the other end of the spectrum where the whole thing is put together by volunteers and paid for via donations (some of them from the big companies who run Debian of course).
Though yeah, some of them do go broke. (what used to be) Mandrake has gone bankrupt about 3 times now. But that's how it should be under capitalism. The best products and models prosper and the inferior ones fall by the wayside. Capitalism is supposed to be unsentimental in that regard - when a model outlives its usefulness then... tough, find another way.
But we currently have a subversion of that whereby ineffectual business models are kept alive through protectionist laws. Like with piracy - games and films and music are copyable and distributable for free now but we're supposed to pretend like they're not so that these established rich companies can bury their heads in the sand and continue making money via a model which just doesn't make any sense any more.
There are companies who get it, of course. Valve being a good example. They openly recognise that piracy is a valid market expression and they compete with it - they try to offer a better service. Which is what it should all be about.