What alternatives do people have to monetize software in a more ethical way?

I particularly don’t understand the funding that some software receive. What they have to grant to receive those funds?

I also search for some type of monetization “model” better than donations, but more ethical than ads.

If it’s too much to explain I would be grateful for terms or books that I could search later.

  • oceanAEnglish
    19·
    10 hours ago

    I like paid cloud or sync features for apps that you can do it yourself as well. Like Zotero or some writing apps

    • LumpyPancakes@lemm.ee
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Sounds a bit like Rustdesk. I’m happily hosting a relay on my VPS but the ‘account’ features don’t work for the free version. I just keep them in a note instead.

    • HappinessPill@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      4·
      10 hours ago

      Cloud services or features monetization are interesting, I’ve seen some companies do a community or a local version and the business version with more features.

      • *dust.sys@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        8 hours ago

        The slippery slope that projects taking this approach fall into boils down to ‘let’s put all our new features behind a business version and never add them to the community version until they become 2 totally different code bases’