A lot of my disparate gaming groups have been migrating to Discord.  The combination of persistent chat, admin utilities, voice chat, and general ease of use cross platform has been a huge hit.  The low overhead on the client is a bonus.  It really is a pretty remarkable system capable of a number of great features right out of the box.  I've been so impressed I threw money at them for a Nitro subscription, even though there was almost no need for me personally to have any of the features.

This prompted a slight bit of introspection.  A few years ago, before I started doing a lot of computer programming, editing, writing, and paid "creative" work, I was one of those people who was quite adamant that things should be free.  I'm a huge fan of open source and spend most of my day working on and with open source software.  The big thing I have noticed though, is whether it is open source or not, in the past couple years my purse strings have been a lot looser when it comes to making donations or buying "subscriptions" for things that I might not necessarily need a subscription for.  Some of this largesse might be due to increase in pay checks, but I think a greater portion is the realization of how much time and energy goes into creating some of these things that people take for granted.

Really, that open source software you are using might be free and open source, but someone (or group of someones) spends a lot of time and effort to provide you with a remarkably polished product without presuming to ask you to buy it.  Next time you think to yourself, "Wow, this really makes my life easier..." turn that thought into, "Wow, I should buy this person a beer (or double latte, whatever takes their fancy)" and click the "Donate" button.

Note, my blog and website are not worth donations, but if you are overwhelmingly interested in throwing money at me, leave a comment and I'm sure we can work something out.  ;)