Nah, I think it's perfectly fair to charge more for a mac version of a program, especially if it's a donation funded open-source one. If you can afford a macintosh, you're more likely to also be able to afford a couple of bucks to support it.
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I'd be willing to bet the demographics of those on Hackernews aren't exactly in the "I'm using Linux because I cannot afford to use any other OS" crowd.
It is the other way around. Linux users should be more vigilant about donating to the projects they find important if they care for the longevity of the project continuing as desktop Linux is a very tiny market to support and has heavy fragmentation issues within it.
Seconded. I can afford any OS but I'm using Linux out of principle. It's also - at least for me - the most seamless developer experience out there because I'm running the same OS on servers and my desktop. Whenever I have to work with Windows or a Mac I feel like a fish out of the water.
> as desktop Linux is a very tiny market to support and has heavy fragmentation issues within it.
It's also free to use and distribute software on, regardless of the hardware/software you own. That's the big difference. Plus, MacOS also commands a relatively small market share with it's own fragmentation issues (doubly so if you're cross-platform).
If Mac users want perpetual builds of their software, they have to perpetually fund a development environment. Linux doesn't really work the same way.
Yes, of course it is fair. You can charge whatever you want for your program. But Ardour is free. Accepting donations is not the same as charging for something.
Technically speaking, ardour.org charges for a build service.
You can get the source code for free from us (either as a tarball or via git). You can get the source code or the binary from somebody else.
But if you want to get the binary from us, we ask you pay at least US$1.
OK, I see, I didn't know that. I was just clicking through to the macos download without actually downloading anything. By the way, there still seems to be a notice before download that macOS will say that the app is damaged, although now it won't complain after notarisation, right?
I actually moved away from Apple/Swift development because of the limitations they place on you even if you pay (I cannot embed an interpreter in my iOS app, really?), and am now coding in TypeScript. So while the $100 are not a big deal, I think, it's a symptom of something that's wrong.