Closed beta sounds fine.
I don’t see any problems with it at this point. After all, the development of an app also costs time and effort. And if you consider that it is just for the early access and not the finished product, there is nothing wrong with it.
Honestly yeah, if this type of paid early access helps fund their development, I can’t really fault them.
There’s one small problem I see here, though. They are restricting their beta testers to an automatically less-diverse group of people meaning that they’re not getting full possible feedback.
That being said, their project, their rules and I support whatever they want to do with their code.
Sure, just quit calling it free and open source software
So in your mind “free and open source” means every two-bit developer brain fart made before a release also needs to be free and open source?
I’m at the point of discovering why software at large tends to be such utter shite.
I have no problem with it. I use mastodon a lot and I really like it. I hope the patrons will provide good feedback to the developers.
it’s annoying but people gotta get paid for their work, i’m fine with it
Like it seems with many people right now, you clearly don’t understand what FOSS is.
Assuming the app is Libre, they are under no obligation to publish binaries or source code to the public - only to their own users (i.e. patrons). However, those patrons have the freedom to modify and distribute the app themselves.
These apps are being developed specifically as means of onboarding new users to mastodon from the app store ecosystem’s “foot traffic”. It makes sense for them to want a limited pool of users for beta to ensure the apps are well polished before the intended audience of less technically inclined people unfamiliar with mastodon use them. How you obtain the pool of beta testers is probably not overly important, using an invite system for example would probably result in largely the same group of insiders who are likely to be patreon supporters having access anyway.
Yeah but you are imagining their motives and predicating their future actions on the products of your imagination.
None of that is happening for any of those reasons. This makes any outcomes you anticipate, well, I’ll be kind and leave it at ‘unlikely’.
My post is in fact based directly on the Mastodon developer’s public statements to this effect
oK, I will cheerfully admit that you weren’t imagining things; that said, I think the masto devs have generally made at least the appearance of evil here, which is potentially as bad as just plain old evil.
Limiting access to FOSS is bad. Everyone involved in FOSS knows that. If they were going to do something like this, they could have at least kept it between themselves and their beta testers, and not made a point of telling everyone they had to be a patreon supporter to get access. Do they have an interest in the success of patreon? if not, what then is their motivation in using a selection metric so directly associated with their cash flow? At some point, they must understand that a donation is made voluntarily, and if you require a donation, now or previously - your software or service is simply not free, and you have been made to pay for it, and that payment is not a donation but a charge.
For the record, I’m not overly invested in your opinion of me. I’m simply sharing my views. I respect your right to differ with me ;)
I think it’s one more incentive not to use mastodon.
Whats more is this: People who sign up to work on a FOSS project should have 0 anticipation, ZERO ANTICIPATION of being paid for their work on that project.
Start a consultancy around it? Sure. Charge to host instances? You bet. Combine those things with other value adds? Certainly. A patreon to facilitate a living while working on FOSS code? questionable. Insist on payment (that’s patreon, people) to push your FOSS contributions to the public? Sorry that is NOT FOSS.
Expect to be paid for FOSS contributions? Maybe you should look up the definition of FOSS, then maybe do something to experience the community. It’s about creating and donating value to the community, for the sake of that community, not self enrichment.
This is not FOSS. This Is Not The Way.
