Software and Plumbers
I’m trying to recreate the home I grew up in as a relaxing sideproject. First digitally and then in foamcore. Love me a good dollhouse.
I remembered Sweet Home 3D which I thought was FOSS. Clicking the download link on the website took me to the App Store version where I was asked pay $4.99 a month to ‘unlock’ features like furniture and wall widths and textures.
Fuck subscriptions. I’d pay a fair price one-time and gladly1. If you’re a plumber2, you do your job, collect payment, and leave. You don’t ask me $5 a month to come back lest my faucets stop working. I don’t see how software is any different.
Anyway. In fine print is a link to the free version off SourceForge (which is somehow still around!) It’s v7.5, while the latest one’s got a shinier UI (allows you to search through furniture, for example) and is v7.6. Whatever.
Here’s a bunch of community-built furniture and other models you can import into your digital dollhouse ♥️
They have a donations page but PayPal informed me that “This organization is currently ineligible to receive donations.”↩︎
“I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.” – Steve Albini, who produced In Utero for Nirvana. It’s a fascinating letter worth meditating over.↩︎