Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.
The largest code contributors to Linux are corporate contributions
Regular people who contribute to OSS do so as a passion project, as a hobby, and have other unrelated jobs that pay the bills. Those people still have to make a living, they’re just not doing it from their software contributions. Journalism isn’t a hobby and you can’t work a day job and still be an effective journalist. News orgs don’t come together as hobby projects.
I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.
How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.
Linux is a prime example of quality that isn’t paid for. No one forces you to pay for Linux, you can of course support the maintainers and donate, but it’s not a for-profit endeavor.
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I’m not defending advertising. I hate it and think it’s ruined the web. I’m just addressing the analogy here wrt Linux.
How do you propose these “open source journalists” make a living? Corporate grants or straight-up corporate jobs just like a huge chunk of Linux development, landing us right back at square one, if not even somewhat behind it? At least independent media exists nowadays, but if the assumption is that all news has to be freely available, like acastcandream said that’d just lead to journalism being very effectively locked out as a career path for anyone who’s not independently wealthy or somehow able to make people actually donate or pay for a subscription despite the content being available for free – and that hasn’t worked out too well for most publishers so far.