I’m doing that now. Have had the free account sitting around for a while now. Decided to upgrade to the $5 version of mail before really starting to use it. They STILL endlessly blast you with that self-promotion. Full-page ads, at that. I’m immediately having regrets about my decision to switch. I’ll be primarily using Thunderbird on desktop, and on Mobile if/when they get around to the k-9 to Thunderbird switch, so I don’t get their self promo there. But the behavior in general doesn’t bode well.
Edit: Before you say nobody uses Yahoo mail, it’s probably the 2nd most used after gmail at my school, afaik, I haven’t met another person using protonmail.
I have Yahoo mail. And it’s just occasionally 1 ad email that’s clearly labeled ad, not greyed out, and maybe a banner. I’ve had nothing too intrusive once it switched. But it gave me a monthly option. Idk, as much as I hate ads, it’s not that bad.
What are you talking about? ProtonMail is still a regular fully functional email provider. Nobody else has to use ProtonMail for you to receive the same emails you would on gmail.
I’ve seen way too many Yahoo and Hotmail emails this year. I’ll send someone a message asking for their email (for business) and they come back with either of those two…
I was helping my dad with some computer stuff and I noticed Microsoft outlook online (Hotmail) has ads as well.
My corporate outlook online doesn’t have ads.
And my personal gsuite (paid for Gmail) doesn’t have ads.
People like to be angry at Google. I mean, fair game, I dislike them a lot myself. But yeah, it’s voicing “yeah I hate that too”, would be my interpretation.
Mailbox.org is 1€ / month for 2GB with first month free (with limitations), I don’t think it’s too much to ask for because Google has other ways of making money.
An instance of the software running as a service? A service.
The official Bitwarden service has a free and a more featureful paid tier.
Element offers paid hosting as a service with a limited free tier.
OSM isn’t software?
Mastodon and Lemmy are hosted and financed by individuals or organisations who usually choose to offer their service free of charge.
All of these are FOSS underneath but have very different costs. There is a difference between commercial for-profit services (BW, Element) and non-profit/public benefit ones (Lemmy, Mastodon) with the latter usually being free of charge.
There’s very little difference between a commercial FOSS application as a service and a commercial non-free software as a service.
For example, you could also buy Slack as a service as opposed to Element. In the end it’s a bill of $x/user/month. Nothing “free” about that other than the hosted software’s source code.
The software is the “primary component” but a service is far more than just a piece of software.
It’s providing infrastructure for the software to run in, maintaining said infrastructure, providing support to customers, billing/accounting, hiring people to do all of that etc. I’d even go as far as saying that the software being hosted ifself plays no major role in the service part.
Sure, but that’s exactly what people mean when they say FOSS service.
Regardless, that’s not the discussion we’re having. The point is that those services are free of charge, and you’re not the product. And that a big reason for that is that they are FOSS services.
Arguing about what people mean is futile. The point the other poster is making, and you’ve now agreed to be true, is that FOSS is software and a service is a service.
Most services powered by FOSS offer a free service as a taster for the paid service. The money made in the paid service tiers pay for the free tiers. Hopefully.
If you are self hosting, you are still paying in your time to set up, host and manage it.
And with FOSS, you are still the product. You are providing bug testing, there are no guarantees, and the idea is you contribute back by investigating bugs you find and submit them to the project.
So many paid products are buggy, get EOL with some small notice, or pad their bottom line selling user data.
At least with FOSS you have the option of picking up maintenance yourself if the corp drops that product. Support for mission critical infrastructure will only last as long as your support contract with closed software.
I disagree that the users are the product with FOSS is what I was getting at. Major contributions being done by individuals is a special case, with little regard for business continuity. There are obvious examples of people that do it, but the real value regardless of the quality of the individual contributors is the ability to fork your own if the contributions stop aligning with your business plan.
That ability to bring the software in house is a guarantee.
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