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Please support this! As graphic designers we should be able to use a open source OS.
(www.change.org)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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I don't mind paying for good software on Linux. I don't understand this idea that everything Linux should be free.
It's not that paying for things is bad. The problem is that good software is vital to digital artists' income, and both purchasing and learning that software is a substantial investment. When a company sells or otherwise enshittifies their software, the artist is then put in a very hard place. Open-source software is the only way to combat that unfortunately likely scenario. By all means, please pay for that software if you can afford to. Doing so subsidizes usage for less fortunate people who may be able to better their situation as a direct result of your generosity.
I have paid (by donating to them) for many of the open source software I use, so I don't think that everything should be free (as beer) but should be free (as freedom) and therefore open source.
That's not what people demand, it's a side effect of users demanding software be open source and developers saying that's not economically viable.
I don't mind paying for software either. I own Affinity & Zbrush licenses. However I run the risk that in the future, these products may be sold to the highest bidder and development stalls (as it happened a couple years ago in the case of Zbrush) or interoperability suffers. When this happens, not only is your database of scenes and files obsolete, you also have to go through the process of learning a different program, and DCCs are... huge. Whole factories. It's very hard to reinvest the time necessary to learn them inside out and be proficient again. It is also impossible to contribute to a non-open codebase. Proprietary programs are ticking bombs.