Pay for Software That Respects You — Andrew TropinPay for Software That Respects You<br>Andrew Tropin<br>Department of Blog Posts, trop.in<br>July 20, 2026
I consider myself a pretty chill and calm person, I can endure and<br>tolerate quite a lot, but I become furious when a program spits in my<br>face with what I didn't ask for, take me for a dumbass or exploit<br>legacy vulnurabilities of my brain. Annoying notification,<br>algorithmic feeds and recommendations, unasked advices and tutorials,<br>stolen out of my pocket data and attention. If I observe such<br>behaviors from a person, I will politely ask them to fuck off at very<br>least. I wouldn't tolerate it from a human, and I definitely won't let<br>it slide from a program.
The computer (laptop/phone/ereader) is mine. Programs I run on them<br>are my tools. They are here to ultimately serve me, not the<br>enterpreneurs, goverments, corporations or whoever what. There is no<br>room for discussion here, there is no "an alternative good opinion".<br>Keep your hands and noses out of my stuff.
You might reasonably ask: "Andrew, if the program is ethical,<br>respectful and doesn't fuck around with you, how people behind it will<br>get a profit?". That's a good question, and I have some thoughts on<br>it.
First of all, there is a hidden assumption that all things should<br>always grow and bring profits. It's not true, a lot of cool things<br>will become much better if they stay at the certain size and just<br>become sustainable (bring enough money, joy and other resources) for<br>their authors and maintainers and keep serving their users. Moreover,<br>in many cases, things built around profit or endless growth simply<br>exploit the planet's resources and vulnerable people under the hood<br>and never become actually sustainable.
Nevertheless, I don't deny that getting money for creating and<br>maintaining software is important. One can of course go quite far on<br>a pure enthusiasm and joy from a positive feedback, but it won't bring<br>food to the table. And even when you make software living in the<br>forest<br>you still need some funds.
Respectful software is almost always also a Free and Open Source<br>Software. The free as in a freedom of course, but also free as in a<br>free beer. The irony here is that monetizing free programs in ethical<br>way is exceptionally hard. Two primary options are grants and<br>donations. There a few more, but they work only for a particular<br>types of software. Donations can be a quite sustainable source of<br>income for the project. So, don't understimate the impact of a small<br>(preferably recurring) donations. It makes a night-and-day difference<br>for developers.
The bottom line is: we have to normalize paying for a respectful<br>software that we obtain for free. Not because we have to, but because<br>it respects us and we want express the respect and appreciation to its<br>authors and maintainers.
My list
There are a few projects that I rely on daily, they are respectful AF<br>to me, but I hadn't had a chance to express my gratitude with a cold<br>hard cash to some of their creators yet, so today I fixed it. I don't<br>recommend you to follow my list, I just want to give you a bit of<br>inspiration and food for thought.
Operating systems
The fundamental part of any non-trivial electronic devices, the place<br>where computing starts.
GNU Guix<br>(donate) :: my primary and only<br>OS on the laptop is based on guix functional package manager. I<br>spend most of the day with it, I do most of the work with it. No<br>question it's a crucial part of my life. No question the package<br>manager is one of the most important pieces of any computing, the<br>foundation for reliable and trustworthy supply chain. The primary<br>repo contains only FOSS, it's not a guarantee on its own, but<br>together with the work of the community it gives a reasonable amount<br>of confidence and piece of mind. And I didn't even started to talk<br>about all the goodies like declarative OS configuration,<br>transactional updates/rollbacks, lisp all over the places and much<br>more.
GrapheneOS<br>(donate) :: it's my phone's OS<br>based on AOSP. Hardened, minimalistic, zero crapware OOB, good<br>sandboxing, granular capabilities/scopes/permissions to restrict<br>untrusted applications. I don't like phones, I don't like to use<br>them, I hate most of the mobile apps, but graphene makes the<br>experience at least manageable and provides some security and<br>privacy to the crappy mobile phone world.
F-droid<br>(donate,<br>sign) :: my go to Android App<br>Repository. Free and Open Source Mobile Software Distribution<br>Ecosystem. We already talked about supply chain for desktop/server<br>OS, now let's cover a mobile devices counterpart. F-droid is an app<br>itself, the app for obtaining and distributing other apps. It's<br>also an app repository. It's a set of tools for creating own<br>packages and repositories. It's user's freedom and privacy first<br>project. It's hard to underestimate how important program<br>distribution is, right? So, this was an obvious pick.
CrossInk<br>(sponsor) :: a fork of CrossPoint, a<br>simple and efficient OS for esp32-based E-ink...