RF Generation Message Board

Back in the good ol' days of the internet everything was free and it never seemed to change. Untill it did change and loads of companies had to charge or beg for money to survive. Many people laughed at this saying nobody would ever pay, but the succes of services like iTunes proves very differently.

I also used to laugh, but I changed my tone some years back. First I payed 10 bucks for the forums at somethingawful.com. And just a moment ago I paypalled 5 euros to the programmer of Azureus, a bittorrent program.

How is your attitude towards paying for services/programs like this and what have you already done?

My thoughts on donating money to people who write programs that are free:

   The programs are usually written with open source development kits, be it on unix/linux or some open source compiler on windows.  This means that they cannot sell the product legally, because of the GNU agreement.   (They knew this when they started.)  However, some say the money is used for hosting of the service so that people can download it.  Free bandwith is easy to come by, either by free hosting services such as geocities or a more appropriate host such as sourceforge or download.com.  

   Paying for foums just pisses me off.  Its not like these sites can't support themselves on advertisements.  Here they are just being greedy.  And I would rather put up with ads than have to pay for a site.  

   Anyways, this prolly made me sound like a jackass, but oh well, its the internet. ;-)  Plus, I don't have a steady source of income.  Maybe my thought will change when I start making some money.

Yeah, it might have only taken him an hour to write the program, but I don't really care. He made my life a little easier with it, and thus deserves some compensation.

And to make some message boards profitable you'd have to overload them with ads. And normal ads wouldn't be enough of course, you'd get annoying gifs, flash and whatever other things people have made up to annoy internet people. I'll gladly pay some money not to have to be annoyed by all of this. Another thing is that the fee keeps the idiots away. No 14 year old L33T speaking jerk will come on a forum you have to pay for.

Yeah, I didn't think of the cost of a forum as a way to keep the riff raff out.   For these forums, do you have to pay to see them, or just to post on them?  If it is the former, then I wouldn't even need to pay, as I rarely post on large forums.  The latter would kind of piss me off though, for the same reason.

I won't ever pay for an internet message board, and thus far I have not ever donated money to a freeware software developer.  I might do that one if the software was REALLY good and I used it a LOT.

However, I do pay for some internet subscriptions.  The most significant of these is eMusic, which I pay $20 a month for.  It's kind of like iTunes, only a way better deal, and they are strictly independent labels.  So I can't get the newest Brittney Spears album, but why would I want to anyway?  I can however get a lot of stuff for just a couple bucks that would otherwise cost me an arm and a leg to import from Europe.  eMusic is awesome.  Used to be a lot better, but it still rocks, and is well worth the money I pay for it.

As soon as I have the money, I will also be purchasing a few software licenses online, for sharware programs I have used and liked.  Namely, PTAssembler.  $39.00, but it will be well worth it to me.

I've dontated money to some people that have made greatfreeware progs.

Otherwise, I try not to pay. That said, I prolly pay more in fees than a lot of people, as I run a board, and sell on eBay etc etc,
My ez-board was self financing, as I sold ad space, but we ditched it in favour of I.P.B and hosting, so I am now in the red again, it will take a long while before I can get it self funding again, and get my money back.

Altough, my very favourite areas of the net are still free.

World of Spectrum
BBC News
etc etc

the only internet service im paying for is my actual connection, other than that, i can probably get the same thing free somewhere else, so i will.

Same here only thing I pay for is the connection.