 A few weeks ago I made a video asking why don't people pay for open source software and in that video I had a very brief thought that I just mentioned very briefly. Let's see if I can say briefly again. And that thought was why don't we have in-app purchases. And I've been thinking about this now for a couple of weeks and there's a problem in the Linux community and that problem is people don't like paying for software. And I can't blame them. I'm not flush with cash. I don't want to pay for all the software that I use either. I do like to contribute what I can. And I think that everybody should contribute what they can. I mean it's just the way software has always worked. You donate to the projects that you enjoy if you have the money to do so. But there's a whole other group of people who are just that are completely against paying for open source software completely. I mean they see the word free and just assume that it means no cost. And they are philosophically against actually paying money for software that has the word free on it. So I've been thinking over the last few months about how as a community we could get past this roadblock we seem to have because it's important. How many open source projects have you seen go under, go belly up or be abandoned however you want to look at it because the developers couldn't afford to keep going. There was that offshoot of GIMP that had to be shut down because they didn't have enough developer resources in order to actually continue on. There have been a ton of different projects out there over the last 30 years that have just had to shut down because they don't make enough money to pay their developers. And like I said that is a huge problem. I mean we all want FOS to succeed. We want open source software and free softwares to succeed. And in order to do that the developers have to feed their families. If they want to focus on their open source projects they have to make money from those projects. And they have to fight constantly against this idea that it's free software therefore people shouldn't have to pay for it. So my brief thought during that video was why don't we have in-app purchases? And I just want to kind of expound upon that just a little bit. On the mobile side of things in-app purchases have just been completely popularized by games and everything. I mean really it's not just games. That's how the vast majority of developers on iOS and Android make their money is by in-app purchases. Now it has been much more popular in games than in other applications but it works in other applications too. And the question I have is would this work on Linux or through open source software? You know it doesn't really have to be on Linux but whatever. Let's just say you had a project like Audacity. Let's say Audacity was forked again. Let's say it was forked really well by a development team that actually wanted to do things with Audacity. But in order to pay for that they put in some in-app purchases in order to make money. Because people aren't going to pay for Audacity. But would you pay for extra features in Audacity? It's possible that they could make some money that way. Now I don't think that if they forced people to pay money for features that it would work. I think it would have to be something similar to what elementary OS does. As much as I just like elementary OS I think they've been a good job of getting people to think at least a little bit about actually paying money. So if you had in-app purchases for Audacity it had to be pay what you can. Defaulting like $5 or something like that. I think you'd have a lot of people who would go through and actually pay money for in-app purchases. If they had that option to still say I really can't afford to I'm going to just select zero and I still get the features. I think the thought experiment for this is that there have to be other ways than just saying hey you got to pay me money for this piece of software because we know as open-source software that doesn't work people just fork your project and give it away for free or the binary appears in app stores or impositories or whatever and you know just bypass the paywall that you had put up. And that might happen here as well. The thought experiment is more how do we get people to actually give developers money because we don't want to keep seeing really great projects die because they couldn't make a living off of it. And that happens over and over again and it's just not it's not a great feeling as a community and it shouldn't be because we want to support as many developers as possible and we're not going to get any more new developers if we can't figure out how they can make a living actually doing this developing open-source software. So that's just a brief ramble about the idea. So what would you think if a piece of open-source software implemented in-app purchases? Do you have any other ideas that we could implement if we all got together as a community to have this discussion of how we could get people to actually pay for open-source software? Let me know in the comments below. I'd really like to hear from you. If you'd like to follow me you can do so as a Linux Cast on Twitter. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux Cast. Before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Devon, Marcus, Meglin, Donnie, Sven, East Coast, Web, Chris, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.