Oh man, I love using proprietary privacy programs.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Would you pay for the extra plus features if the source code were also made available?
I "pay for" / donate to many projects like matrix.
Why wouldn't I pay for the stuff I use or like?
I also donate to KDE even though I use GNOME
People push money into paypal, spotify, netflix, visa, et al.
I like giving money to the libre/free stuff I use
Yes, ofc!!
Some foss projects have that model, eg FairEmail iirc (and yes, I "bought" it). Similarly others offer unessential perks for "the paid version". (And others still offer support, sort of like a SLA.)
But "paid version" it's a bit of legacy proprietary thinking, I'm happy if it works, but just have the mindset to donate anything to the projects you use/enjoy (even better, have a monthly donations set up, big dev projects really need that cf predictability).
What I will not do is willingly pay for property software (outside of games and similar stuff). Idk even what I bought last, but maybe like 2 or 3 proprietary programs in my whole life (W95, some Android app to code my car via obd, ... I guess by cars had/have a bunch of closed sauce sw I technically paid for).
Curious how you feel about their paid search engine model?
Sorry, I don't know enough about it to comment specifically this case, but in general I think that pay-to-search would be great (run by a corp or gov - both ways have their own future dev risks).
Search engines shouldn't be financially motivated, they are too important - but if subscriptions are the only motivation (and search engine the only business!) that indeed mitigates a lot of the core concerns I have. I would pay for Google's search engines (if packaged in an independent corp) from two decades ago.
You know, if it's free, you are the product. It's not like you don't currently "pay" for using Googles shit, it's just not in a way you immediately see.
Generally speaking, services you don't run locally seem like a logical thing to have a price tag, you outsource the "work" (of the service) not just the dev.
Search engines are also super difficult to run locally well in my experience. Stuff like SearXNG are okayy, but they just pull entirely from other site's indexes. Having any sort of index of your own is much harder. Yacy is intriguing, it's a P2P concept but it just never seemed to work well.
I've found 4get is a much better experience than searx ever was (and I used searx as my main for a while)
Similar to SearXNG, minus privacy.