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.
My Kofi donations will be relatively skewed since I started with GitHub sponsors for a time before, which is where most of my donations come from.
GitHub sponsors can make things quite frictionless compared to something like KoFi, but whether that helps may significantly depend on the audience for your software, since it's less likely to be a benefit for non-technical/develop audience who don't already have a GitHub account set up for business.
Ultimately, donations/sponsors are a hard grift, and what really matters is having an audience, and luck. I built up an audience for quite a few years before going down any kind of monetization route, but that meant I had an ecosystem to play into by that time. I have several routes of community engagement (Reddit, YouTube, PeerTube, Project Blog + Email updates, Discord) which help build, retain and personally connect with an audience, which I believe does help in this area.
Overall my donations (across KoFi and GitHub sponsors) has continued to grow, but more steadily after hitting an initial potential cap within my audience.
If interested, I have written a bit more about how I've acquired many of my sponsors here, and I recently created a visual breakdown of my 2024 donation/sponsor sizes here.