less_retarded_wiki/living.md

Making Living

The question of how to make a living by making something that's to be given out for free and without limitations is one of the most common in the context of FOSS/free culture. Noobs often avoid this area just because they think it can't be done, even though there are ways of doing this and there are many people making living on FOSS, albeit ways perhaps more challenging than those of proprietary products.

One has to be aware that money and commercialization always brings a high risk of profit becoming the highest priority (which is a "feature" hard-wired in capitalism) which will compromise the quality and ethics of the produced work. Profiting specifically requires abusing someone else, taking something away from them. Therefore it is ideal to create LRS on a voluntary basis, for free, in the creator's spare time. This may be difficult to do but one can choose a lifestyle that minimizes expenses and therefore also time needed to spend at work, which will give more free time for the creation of LRS. This includes living frugally, not consuming hardware and rather reusing old machines, making savings, not spending on unnecessary things such as smoking or fashion etc. And of course, if you can't make LRS full-time, you can still find relatively ethical ways of it supporting you and so, again, giving you a little more freedom and resources for creating it.

Also if can somehow rip off a rich corporation and get some money for yourself, do it. Remember, corporations aren't people, they can't feel pain, they probably won't even notice their loss and even if you hurt them, you help the society by hurting a predator.

Is programming software the only way to make money with LRS? No, you can do anything related to LRS and you don't even have to know programming. You can create free art such as game assets or writings, you can educate, write articles etc.

Making Money With FOSS

For inspiration we can take a look at traditional ways of making money in FOSS, even if a lot of them may be unacceptable for us as the business of the big FOSS is many times not so much different from the business of big tech corporations.

With open source it is relatively easy to make money and earn salary as it has become quite successful on the market -- the simplest way is to simply get a job at some company making open source software such as Mozilla, Blender etc. However the ethics of the open source business is often questionable. Even though open source technically respects the rules of free software licenses, it has (due to its abandonment of ethicality) found ways to abuse people in certain ways, e.g. by being a capitalist software. Therefore open source software is not really LRS and we consider this way of making money rather harmful to others.

Working for free software organizations such as the FSF is a better way of making living, even though still not perfect: FSF has been facing some criticism of growing corruption and from the LRS point of view they do not address many issues of software such as bloat, public domain etc.

Way of Making Money with LRS

Considering all things mentioned above, here are some concrete things of making money on LRS. Keep in mind that a lot of services (PayPal, Patreon etc.) listed here may possibly be proprietary and unethical, so always check them out and consider free alternatives such as Liberapay. The methods are following:

• donations: You may ask for donations e.g. on your website or Patreon (people often ask for cryptocurrencies or traditional money via services like Liberapay, PayPal or Buy Me a Coffee). For significant earnings you need to be somewhat popular because people donate extremely rarely, but if your work is good, there sometimes appears a generous donor who sends you a lot of money ({Happened to me at least once. I hereby thank the person greatly. ~drummyfish}). It can help if you create "content" such as programming videos alongside your project to get some "following", but it may also distract you and take some of your energy. People like Luke Smith make quite some big money like this. A lot of free culture artists are successful in creating free art this way.
• crowd funding: A method similar to donations but a little more "encouraging" for the donors. You set a financial goal and if enough people donate to reach that goal, you get the money and create the project. Patreon and Kickstarter are typically used for this.
• pay what you want: Here you create the work and then offer a download with optional payment, typically with some suggested price. People who can't afford to pay don't have to. This method has the advantage of not putting you under deadline pressures like the crowd funding method. Sites like itch.io are friendly to this option.
• selling physical products and merchandise ("merch"): This method makes use of the fact that selling physical items is usually not considered unethical, unlike selling copies of information. So you can e.g. create a free video game and then sell T-shirts or coffee mugs with that video game's themes. In the past some GNU/Linux distros used to sell their systems on nice "officials" CDs, but nowadays CDs are kind of dead. Open consoles kind of do this as well, they create FOSS games and tools and then sell hardware that runs these games.
• You can specifically make use of the advantages of LRS and get some company to pay you. For example an open console creator will be highly interested in an engine for 3D games that will run on very low-spec embedded hardware because that will increase interest in their product. Existing FOSS engines, even the lightweight ones, are bloated and won't run on such hardware, however LRS ones, such as small3dlib, will. Even if the company doesn't pay you directly, they might at least send you their product for free ({I got some open consoles for free for porting Anarch to them. ~drummyfish}).
• selling services: Like with merchandise, selling services is normally not considered unethical and so we can do it. The services can e.g. be running a server with LRS software with paid accounts or offering maintenance/configuration of someone else's servers. This supports the development of the software in question and helps you get paid.
• selling on proprietary sites (CONTROVERSIAL): This may not be acceptable by everyone, but it can be possible to create a free work and then distribute it under free conditions in some places and simultaneously sell this item in places distributing proprietary assets. E.g. one may create a 3D model and put it under a free license on opengameart while also selling it in 3D models stores like TurboSquid -- this will make the model available for everyone as free but will make people who don't bother to search the free sites pay for it. This may potentially bring much more money than the other methods as the proprietary stores have big traffic and people there are specifically willing to spend money. However, this supports the intellectual property business. Important note: read the terms&condition of the proprietary site, it may for example be illegal for you to share your assets elsewhere if the proprietary site makes you sign an exclusive deal for them. {I am actually guilty of this, been selling some small 3D models on TurboSquid. It provides a kind of stable mini-income of about $3/month. ~drummyfish}
• non-profit: It is possible to run a non-profit organization that creates software for public benefit -- details differ by each country but a non-profit may receive funding from the state and be exempted from taxes. This method may however require a lot of effort (as running an organization is much more difficult than setting a donation website) and may potentially be limiting in some ways (governments may have condition for the funding etc.).