> You know, as a kid I learned BASIC from school friends, neighbors, and family members, and taught BASIC to many more, by trading the source code freely.
Well you can still do all fo that. Get your friends to send you their BASIC code and type that yourself into the console.
Even as a kid, you weren't paying somebody to host your code.
Not that it matters, but I traded lots of BASIC code on local bbs’s for free, and on floppies and cassettes for free. I didn’t really mind pedaling my bicycle to share my next release of “Pong” or whatever I was up to, kids love sneakernets, but I don’t think this program supports any form of sneakernet, that’s a real shame for kids who don’t have credit cards and most certainly won’t be given permission for “in game purchase”, few parents will understand or approve such a thing.
That’s fine, nobody said this is for kids, or for education, it is what it is, I respect the effort and design to some degree, but won’t fund it. it goes against the very spirit of BASIC as an easy, educational, and naturally open source language.
my other beef is why should content creators, who add value to the platform, pay more money?
I really enjoy publishing FOSS, I maintain half a dozen of pypi’s top 100 packages, I feel joy and pride when I see my packages fly by on screens of colleagues. but if pypi starts charging me “server tickets” to publish these packages, strange EULA’s that sign my rights over, and to have to delete the less popular packages to make room to publish new ones, etc. I’d feel really damn sore about it.
I’d publish it as PDF images and instruct users Like you to print it out and type it in, or dish out $9. This would be my rebellion for not getting a single penny for the thousands of volunteer hours that other people are now paying to receive a copy of. It just rolls my brain around and around to think about both players and creators paying money.
Well you can still do all fo that. Get your friends to send you their BASIC code and type that yourself into the console.
Even as a kid, you weren't paying somebody to host your code.