TMTOWTDI

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

One of my favorite acronyms must be invoked here: TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There’s a price behind everything, especially in the tech world (and free/open-source software is no exception). I would like to give a shameless plug for donating to FOSS developers and explain the costs behind using the web.

FOSS developers are awesome, awesome people to me. They, for various personal reasons that are often not monetary, spend lots of their time creating, maintaining, and improving the universe of software that is FOSS. They work on projects from operating systems (Linux and Unix) to databases (MySQL, SQLite) to programming languages (Python), PHP, Perl) to web servers (Apache) to web software (Drupal-powers EmeryCentral, Wordpress, phpBB) to word processing (OpenOffice and Abiword) to photo editing (the GIMP). There are FOSS applications in every domain that there is a need in (including niches such as amateur radio). The quality of the work is so good for much of the software that it surpasses anything else produced commercially, and thus the operating system and web server that power most of the Internet and the hardware that runs it (Linux and Apache) are community-built, as well as many of the web software tools that let you utilize the Web. My simple plea is that you occasionally donate $5 here and there to the projects that have allowed the Web to flourish and grow with the freedom and pace that it has.

(Readers familiar with developing and deploying websites should skip ahead)

For anyone who does not know what expenses go into making a website or developing FOSS software (which is done using the Internet to coordinate team members spread all over the globe), this is to give you a basic overview. To have a website, you obviously need a server) connected to the Internet. You will usually pay to have a server located in a datacenter with hundreds or thousands of other servers and powerful air conditioning and multiple redundant power sources and Internet connections, or you may share space on a server with other users using virtualization. Web-hosting space is available from $5 a month upwards, but to have a site support thousands or tens of thousands of views a day quickly becomes expensive because of the amount of work the server needs to do and the amount of bandwidth) that is needed.

To cover expenses that are inevitably incurred, sites (be they homepages for a FOSS project, a blog, a news site, or any other site) will pursue a number of solutions that will be discussed in my next post: advertising and subscription services.