Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments

by LukeB_UK • 11 years ago

102 130 11 years ago

blog.elementary.io

It would be interesting to see if the new dialog box is improving the number of users paying for the software, but I guess they are waiting for more data to see that. Appart for that, I have absolutely no problem paying for Elementary, in my opinion is the best Linux distribution and by far. Everything is really polished and well done.

Mikeb853• 11 years ago

Everything is really polished and well done.

I'm using Elementary OS right now. It's pretty, but it's really no more polished than Ubuntu. In fact, it just mostly uses the same Ubuntu repositories. That's not a bad thing, but it's worth keeping in mind that Elementary OS is as good as it is because it's building on Ubuntu.

neuropie2• 11 years ago

I wonder how Canonical feel about Elementary making money off an operating system that receives updates from archive.ubuntu.com

mirimir2• 11 years ago

If they accepted Bitcoins, I would have paid some USD. But mirimir has no credit cards.

markild3• 11 years ago

They do, though...

mirimir2• 11 years ago

You're right! I must have missed it.

jasonkester2• 11 years ago

This is completely baffling. Just remove the option to download your thing for free.

You know it has value. You just spent a thousand words explaining why you think people should pay money for your thing. There's an easy way to get them to do that: Charge money for your thing.

No need to guilt anybody. No need to apologize. You built an entire operating system. Those cost money. Give your users the option of paying you, not using your thing, or (if you absolutely can't detach yourself from this irrational need to give your work away for free) building it from source.

detaro• 11 years ago

Removing the option to download GPL software for free seems like a pointless exercise...

Also: they build a set of desktop apps for Ubuntu and did some other polishing work. Not to say that isn't hard and important work, but it also isn't "building an entire operating system".

jasonkester2• 11 years ago

Not at all. The "download" we're talking about here is the binary (unless I'm mistaken).

People with $10 in their bank account and the ability to calculate the value of half an hour of their time will happily pay to avoid fighting dependencies to compile this thing from source. The angry entitled people commenting on this poor guy's blog can download the source for free.

(And to your edit, people who think that there is not $10 of value added can simply not install it.)

Everybody wins.

derefr3• 11 years ago

I don't see why. The GPL requires that you provide the source for free. It says nothing about providing the binaries for free. The entire job of a distro is packaging and ease-of-configuration-management. If you do that part yourself to spite them, you're removing the entirety of the advantage you were getting by using their distro in the first place. The incentives work out.

mikekchar2• 11 years ago

I think some people (including the other repliers) don't quite understand the GPL. You don't have to distribute the source code, but if you distribute a binary, you must offer to distribute the source to the people you distributed the binary to. Similarly, you can't stop them from redistributing either the binaries or source, or modifying them under the GPL license.

So charging for GPL software (whether binary or source) is far from useless. Back in the day I often bought CDs with a Linux distribution on it. It was easier than downloading it when the internet was not as pervasive as it is now.

Having said that, I don't think they have a viable business model. Charging for distributing a Linux base OS, even if you have added your own changes, is unlikely to make a lot of money. They would probably be better off trying to find a niche and then do contract work to improve it.

lvillani• 11 years ago

Synergy binaries (http://synergy-project.org) are behind a paywall. The same goes for Textual (https://www.codeux.com/textual/). They are both GPL and BSD-licensed pieces of software. Ardour (http://ardour.org/download.html) operates the same way.

By paying a small sum you get access to precompiled binaries, some level of support and peace of mind that you are helping developers continue their work in a sustainable way.

Frankly I would like to see this model adopted more often in the FLOSS world.

ukandy• 11 years ago

"You built an entire operating system."

It's Ubuntu (under the hood), marketed at people that wouldn't consider using a *nix OS.

TorKlingberg• 11 years ago

Then they would lose 99.875% of their userbase. The support forums would dry up, there would be fewer advocates etc. A Linux distro needs a critical mass of users.

Shivetya• 11 years ago

still comes across as a dick move to have people enter the zero. making people feel guilty for an allowed act is just dumb if you are trying to establish a working relationship

mcjiggerlog• 11 years ago

This would just mean that people would pirate it. It might not be a problem for you now, but for people in some parts of the world or budding young users will have issues with having to pay.

markild3• 11 years ago

Interesting read. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard about elementary.

Though, not directly related to their payment model, I wish they would more clearly state that they're a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I couldn't "quickly" find any info on it anywhere on their site, so I had to find out from Wikipedia. I guess this has something to do with their target audience, and the way the sell this as an alternative to Windows or OS X.

Somewhat related to their payment model, I would very much like to see them contribute some of what they're making back to Ubuntu/Debian, if they don't already.

njloof• 11 years ago

It's also unclear from their homepage why I would want yet another OS/UI combo. What are the advantages? Does it run any apps? I'm definitely not paying $10 sight unseen. Maybe a 30-day trial would be a better model before asking for payment.

narrowrail• 11 years ago

Why would they need to offer a trial? Just type in 0$ and download or just download the torrent directly (they default to a torrent anyway, at least when choosing 0$).

thewhitetulip2• 11 years ago

This has already been discussed on HN before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995

staz• 11 years ago

Yes this is a 3 months old blog post, don't know why it's getting frontpaged again

misframer• 11 years ago

It's quite normal for submissions to be reposted and make it to the front page again.

nubela• 11 years ago

Why don't you include the payment WITHIN the system? I wouldn't pay before I try eOS, it is only if I stick and use it, will I consider paying.

toyg6• 11 years ago

I'd go further and say that opensource distributions should all have a standard customizable package that will "nag" users after a certain amount of hours from first boot. The package could spring a pop-up if X is running, or send an email to root@ (or whatever the "admin" user is). If done well, I bet a lot of users wouldn't mind dropping $5 or $10 -- probably more than you get by doing the occasional donation drive.

In fact, some good soul could get together the main actors (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch) and set up a shared infrastructure that will provide a common flow for this revenue stream (payment UI, merchant accounts etc), sharing fixed costs.

rspeer• 11 years ago

... just like all those people who paid for WinZip and mIRC?

hueving4• 11 years ago

This will alienate developers that don't want to work on a distro that is a cash grab.

SunShiranui7• 11 years ago

I don't think that's a very good idea usability wise. I certainly don't like being interrupted during my work with requests for donations.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

That's a very, very bad idea. It's concepts like this that make computing suck so hard (cf. yesterday's discussion about web being broken). A nagging pop-up is literally saying "fuck you" to your users. Sure, it may work in some cases from financial perspective (though probably not here, just like people switch from WinRAR to 7zip mostly because the latter doesn't nag), but it is crapping on your users.

Software vendors should be honest. You want me to pay you? Say it up-front. You offer me a free version? Don't be surprised me, and most of others, are going to take it. Want to make the free version limited? Say it up-front, but don't beg for money.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

Please think before you type. You're describing the universally hated nag for payment ever so "popular" in mobile apps. Hell, the other week when paid skyrim mods were a hot topic, some dev tried to do it in one of his free Skyrim addons and he got universally hated, flamed and hanged for it. I can't even begin to describe how negative the reaction was.

It baffles me people like you can actually still think things like these are a good idea. I'm all for getting FOSS devs paid, but your post essentially says "why don't they just preinstall some software from advertising companies that will pay them for it".

rlpb2• 11 years ago

It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software has a huge cost", but there's no mention of the money they're collecting going to the developers of Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams that surely together comprise the majority of the work that they're referring to.

Basing their wording on the huge development cost of the entire work, rather than what they're adding, seems misleading to me since what they're adding is a tiny proportion of the entire cost they're referring to; yet they seem to want to take the money as justified by the entire cost.

That's not to say that Elementary OS developers aren't adding value. Clearly they are if users are downloading from them, and it's fine to ask users to pay for that.

colechristensen• 11 years ago

Consider also, quite importantly, that a large volume of the work done on any Linux-based operating system is and has been done entirely without money changing hands.

pjmlp7• 11 years ago

Only when one forgets that most of those developers:

- were payed to work on GNU/Linux by their employers

- had a different source of income

- were students with their parents paying for their bills

- were building a portfolio for a job change

So money did change hands, even if indirectly.

orik• 11 years ago

Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. I'd like point out a couple of quotes. https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.eleme...

We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.

Elementary's self-important attitude has and continues to completely baffle me. People joke about ElementaryOS being just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell, because it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell.

Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools, and yet they made the argument that the end user is 'cheating the system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for free.

If Elementary wanted to take the high ground, they'd introduce a Humble Bundle style payment system split between the various foundations they're building off of. Maybe the defaults would look something like 30% to the Linux Foundation, 20% to the FSF, 20% to Debian, 20% to Ubuntu, and 10% to themselves.

ikurei2• 11 years ago

I don't disagree with what you said, but I'd like to comment on a few points.

We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.

(Auch, reading that hurt; still...)

There they didn't say users are cheating for not paying them, but for not paying in general.

Also consider that The Linux Foundation, the FSF, Canonical... all have way bigger communities and visibiliy, and relations with big companies and other ways of obtaining economical support. Elementary depends only on their reduced user base.

it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell.

Well, yes. But they still put a lot of work into it. It rest on the shoulders of the GTK and Gnome giants, but they have still put a lot of work. Describing them that way isn't, imho, fair at all.

Apart from the Pantheon's surface, they've been working on libraries as Contracts and Granite GTK. I've no idea if they're complicated behemoths or ridiculously thin work-of-an-afternoon additions to GNU/Linux.

I think I would be fine with it if they had just mentioned "hey, our hard work depends on the hard work of this fellas, consider donating to them too!". Specially if really they are not making any profit as of yet, I don't think it's that bad to ask for the funding to continue your work from the people who enjoy it.

PD: I'm writing this from Elementary, which I use on two computers. In this one I ended up going back to Awesome WM, but I keep Pantheon on the other. I really like it, even if it isn't an incredible distance away from Xubuntu.

Although I'm not particularly wealthy, I'll consider donating a few bucks to Elementary. It is not the first OSS project I donate to, but I'll also consider donating to it's upstream.

PD2: I was partly playing devil's advocate. Even as an Elementary user, I didn't particularly like this post.

hueving4• 11 years ago

It's their fault for screwing up their business model so much that they have to resort to attacking their users. There is little to defend here.

I have never seen a project succeed that tries to trick or guilt you into giving money. Making users feel like shit is bad UX.

ekianjo5• 11 years ago

Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools

Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS.

It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communities.

SunShiranui7• 11 years ago

While the amount of work those upstream projects have contributed is indeed monumental, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss elementary OS' contribution to the free software operating system landscape.

I think their work in providing a good UX for GNU\Linux operating systems is admirable and it's a very important step to really make something most would be happy to use.

krat0sprakhar2• 11 years ago

Even if their OS is nothing but Ubuntu + Pantheon wrapped in a fancy cover how does that make them 'wrong' for asking money for their efforts? How exactly is this different from someone making a fancy HTML5 bootstrap based template for wordpress and then charging money for it? Clearly the number of man-hours gone into making that template is nothing compared to the effort spent on bootstrap and wordpress - which are both free and open-source.

Lastly, concluding that asking money for your work (alongside providing free downloads) is akin to 'they are only in for the money' affirms my fears that I cannot even dream of living off of any open source software that I make.

unicornporn• 11 years ago

Daniel recently quit hos job to work full time on Elementary[1]. Perhaps that is one reason they've been pursuing this shaming for not paying strategy lately.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/danielfore/status/583810531766722...

kuschku• 11 years ago

With the shit they’ve been doing, someone should just fork all their packages, and provide them as a nice set of packages for standard Ubuntu. Maybe we could even see an eBuntu (like Kubuntu, Xubuntu) with 15.10?

SunShiranui7• 11 years ago

I don't think the fact that elementary OS builds upon Ubuntu (and others upstream projects) has any relevance to whether or not one should pay for elementary OS. Those upstream developers have each made a decision regarding their licensing and financing models, so there's no obligaton for elementary to pay them, especially considering how elementary is a much smaller reality than other open source software.

With that said, according to elementary a good part of the donations they receive goes towards bug bounties, which are not limited to elementary OS itself but are also assigned to upstream projects.

Without getting hung up on phrases like "cheating the system", which is admittedly poor wording, I do agree with the base premise of their blog post: open source development has to be sustainable and they have chosen to ask the users directly for a contribution.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

deong• 11 years ago

I think the attitude exemplified by phrasing like "cheating the system" is the sole reason why anyone has a problem with them at all. If we ignore the apparent entitlement, then sure, it's fine.

Nursie4• 11 years ago

"we feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement is worth funding."

I think this is also misleading, as they haven't produced an entire operating system so far as I can tell.

They're entitled to charge what they like. Unfortunately for them, everyone else is entitled to redistribute for nothing.

rgbrenner• 11 years ago

Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools

This attitude is why we don't see Linux startups -- just volunteer efforts, run on peoples spare time that they eventually get burnt out on and give up.

They are asking for $10. They aren't asking for a huge sum of money. $10 could be a very reasonable amount of money for the effort they've put into it.

Yes, it's built on free software... but when I (and many other people too) build their start up on free software and charge money.. we don't ask how much of that is going to Nginx, Linux, etc... we say, they're charging for the time/effort required to build that service.

And just like how many startups would be forced to charge higher prices if they had to redevelop nginx, etc... elementaryOS wouldn't be $10 if they had to duplicate all of that work.

icebraining• 11 years ago

orik isn't criticizing them for charging, though, but for calling some users "cheaters" for doing essentially the same they are doing - getting Free Software for free.

pjmlp7• 11 years ago

This is why after my open source phase as university student back in the mid-90's, I ended up doing mostly commercial software.

Unless one hits jackpot a la RedHat, or is doing consulting/teaching/web paywalls, open source seldom pays bills.

adekok2• 11 years ago

They are asking for $10. They aren't asking for a huge sum of money. $10 could be a very reasonable amount of money for the effort they've put into it.

It's a matter of marketing. Everyone knows it's based on Ubuntu, so they feel cheated when they're asked to pay for a free OS.

A marketing solution is to sell it as:

* base system $0 - VM with free download, no whines about "cheating". And the base VM gets you an Ubuntu image which boots to a shell prompt.

* Elementary additions: $$. The base system plus our less-filling, weight-loss inducing proprietary magic!

People are happy to pay money for linux application. Not many people, and for not a lot of money. But people do pay.

Having happy paying customers is a lot better than calling your potential customer base "cheaters". That's just stupid .

zxcvcxz5• 11 years ago

This attitude is why we don't see Linux startups

What are you talking about? A startup that sells Linux distros? There are A LOT more reasons we don't see people selling Linux distros than just this.

So what does this have to do with anything?

If your argument is that people don't use Linux in the start up world that's wrong too. Plenty of start ups use Linux and I'd say it's about 50/50 when it comes to share between OS X and Linux. We already know from stack overflow surveys that OS X and Linux are neck-and-neck when it comes to developer use, and we already know that Linux is almost always the choice when it comes to servers for start-ups.

Is your argument that people don't want to buy Linux software? There are plenty of people paying for Linux software (especially enterprise) and you can just look at the humble bundle for evidence that Linux users are more than willing to pay for software. I don't know many Mac only start-ups that are very successful.

anon3_3• 11 years ago

Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. They rescinded it. No reason to make them dwell in misery forever.
Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu,

So?

they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools,

And? People get paid to work on both. Some people do it pro bono. They don't expect to be paid.

'cheating the system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for free.

Totally not true. There is a lot of refinement in the UX. If it's so easy, why is the distribution so special? Why don't you just whip up a bash script and send them out of business?

Even if they just combined Open Source works, they have every right to flip the combination (which takes time and skill) at a value. If you package something for me that saves my 10 developers a day each of config time - I just saved thousands of dollars.

aledujke2• 11 years ago

I used elementary in the past and I was very happy with it. I did not want to donate but I did want to support them by buying their ware. Stickers and shirts. Problems is... for over 3 years now their store only supports US customers. A year ago they said they are working on it and still have not fixed it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/23v9o9/element...

Yet they want you to donate.

anon3_3• 11 years ago

I used elementary in the past and I was very happy with it.

Are you aware that they just may want to be able to have a part or full time job doing software?

What do you expect them to have? A trust fund from their parents and they just give you free stuff?

Stickers and shirts.

Serious? The gap of money they'd keep to feed themselves from that - plus the extra labor (distraction from improving the code).

I think you mean well, but here and other commenters seem to view GPL more as a right to pirate legally.

Who is the real freeloader, the guy who is very happy with [software]" and can't pay without foaming at the mouth, or someone who actually developed a created work in the first place*.

The insensitivity and entitlement is mind-boggling, from my perspective as a coder.

simula67• 11 years ago

Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools,

Neither Canonical, the kernel developers nor FSF demands you pay them money for Ubuntu, Linux or GNU Tools. Nor do they oppose making money from software. Even their own software.

and yet they made the argument that the end user is 'cheating the system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for free.

If they want to be paid money for free ( as in freedom ) software they have the right to demand it. I see no moral problem with this. They may be delusional, but not immoral.

joosters• 11 years ago

But it's entirely the wrong time to try and charge customers. How can I decide how much to pay for it before I've even downloaded the thing?

(Also, the shading on the payment buttons is so minor that it is very difficult to see which one is selected on my iPad screen)

SunShiranui7• 11 years ago

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't we pay for most products before actually being able to use them?

diggan• 11 years ago

A normal, physical product, yeah sure. But most SaaS, Baas or any other software project usually have a demo/trial for you to use before deciding if it's worth paying for.

b3lvedere• 11 years ago

Hey, it's your OS. Do whatever you want with it as long as you respect the GPL. You do not need to explain that.

I've tried Elementary a bit. Didn't like it. Sorry.

jitix• 11 years ago

It's not bad that they are asking for money. Although the current norm is to give away the binaries for free, I think they can and should charge for the service they are providing by building the binaries and making them available for download. Especially since it's a very polished distro. But the wording on the blog post appears a little arrogant since it is not an entire OS built from scratch.

ed0wolf• 11 years ago

Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right.

Huh. That doesn't make sense.

mmmmmbop• 11 years ago

Guess it is meant to say write. I cringed reading that.

embik5• 11 years ago

Hello everyone, I'm a contributor to elementary (did some small coding and sitting around in their Slack). I'm not 100% sure I should post, but I've seen the HN community being very reasonable, so here we go. Please note I'm in no way official for elementary and I wasn't involved with this blog post at all; I just would like to provide another perspective on the topics discussed here.

Yes, the blog post is/was terrible worded. That "cheating" thing ... Yeah. It was pretty bad. It's a difficult topic to talk about money in FOSS (for obvious reasons) and the blog post did it really the wrong (still does for me, but that's a very personal opinion). I'm also not really okay with the whole pay-before-download thing, but I'm really not the one entitled to make such decisions.

From my point of view, the whole idea was "people should support things they like". I completely understand some do not like Pantheon and think it's a OS X ripoff (I've seen people calling almost everything "osx ripoff", but there are parallels between OS X and elementary, no doubt). Therefore, these don't understand why they should pay for something they do not value. Totally understandable. But there are people who love elementary (even more than OS X, for that matter) and are using it on a daily basis. elementary matters to these people and there are two ways of supporting FOSS projects you are using: Contribute time (code) or money. There are better ways of shifting attention to this, of course. I don't doubt that ...

What baffles me nonetheless is how people view "us" (the elementary devs) for single blog posts and a few design desicions (I'm not talking about the website stuff, more about desktop design) people disagree with. Well, I'm totally biased of course, but there really is no vibe of "money grabing" or "entitlement" around the team. Most of us are young guys from all over the world coding on elementary in their spare time. It's a difficult thing to make money with a desktop-focused Linux distro and there is nobody really making money. Nobody's in for the big bucks. It would be lovely to employ some of the devs full-time, but that's simply not possible at the moment. elementary won't be the next big thing people throw money at, and everyone's aware of that fact.

Regarding "give money back to Ubuntu / GNU / the kernel", which is a difficult topic as well ... I'm trying to get my words right. Let's say, most of these things are in the lucky situation of corporate interest; Canonical is making their money via Ubuntu (server) support and server services (I frankly doubt they make a lot of money via the desktop), same applies to the kernel. The amounts of money elementary could provide to these projects / companies / whatever would show elementary's good intentions, but it'd a drop in the bucket. Whenever possible, elementary tries to bring patches upstream to benefit everyone. As Pantheon is building heavily on top of the GNOME stack, some devs pushed bug fixes and features to GTK or Mutter. We have some guys from Xfce, GNOME and other FOSS projects around to talk about our stuff if we think they would be useful for others. elementary is a really small project with only a few constant contributors, but everyone is trying to give their best.

Hopefully I was able to describe my stance without coming off as entitled. If not, please forgive me.

rlpb2• 11 years ago

Has Elementary ever considered joining the Ubuntu family? That would qualify you for http://community.ubuntu.com/help-information/funding/ I think.

embik5• 11 years ago

I am not sure if anybody considered it, but we have at least one Ubuntu member around. This funding sounds a bit like for single persons doing Ubuntu-specific things, but I will bring it up! Thank you.

embik5• 11 years ago

I'm new to HN and do not understand why I cannot edit the post above, but there was something I wanted to add:

elementary does try to use its limited funding to support things outside of the project, for example putting out bug bounties for bugs or features in other FOSS projects that everyone would benefit of. And there was some money for debconf15 as well: http://debconf15.debconf.org/sponsors.xhtml

brusch642• 11 years ago

If there are volunteers doing this work (unpaid ?) - what are you using this money for ?

Just for infrastructure ? If not, how do you get paid ? And how many percent of the developers get paid ? Who makes the decision who gets paid and who doesn't get paid ?

I am just interested how something like this is done in an open source project. I've seen some other projects (not programming related) which got really complicated and ruined, because they got money and started "distributing" wealth which left some of the people disgruntled (basically most of the bands who got successful have stories like that).

embik5• 11 years ago

Mh, as hinted I'm not part of the core team, so I cannot say anything definite, but a lot of money is going into bug bounties: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/elementary/bounties (a blog entry from february talks about $15,000 total in bounties and $3,470 to upstream projects). These bug bounties are paid out to contributors solving nasty bugs, but it's open to everyone to solve these bugs and get the bounties.

Currently there is only one person really employed by elementary LLC (and paid regular), and that's Daniel Foré, the project lead. He quitted his job, but from what I understand, he earns significantly less than in his job before. Everyone else is "only" getting money from bug bounties.

markild3• 11 years ago

To me, it's not the money that's the issue.

I just learned about elementary today, and when I'm presented with the main landing page, I feel that it is being very dishonest in what it is actually selling me. I'm not arguing the value of your work, but I feel that the whole product is very conscious about not mentioning Linux, Ubuntu etc.

Give me a proper explanation about what you (the group of people) are doing that brings value. Tell me what your work is based upon. Tell me it is free (as in speech, and as in beer), and let me make a informed decision if I feel this is something I want to pay for.

embik5• 11 years ago

Mh, I agree there should a mention of Ubuntu. As I'm not involved with the ... mh, let's say "marketing" / PR side of elementary, I can only guess, but most likely it wasn't considered an information a potential (target) user of elementary needs (I don't agree with this, I'm a technical guy, but I'm not elementary's target audience either). The main page does mention "Open Source" and "Linux" in big letters. It's at the bottom though.

ifdefdebug• 11 years ago

2,000,000 * (100 - 99.875) / 100 * (10 + 1) / 2 = 13750 They piss everybody off for literally nothing.

sudioStudio64• 11 years ago

For all of the people asking about contributions to the OS...its a fact that most people who work on Linux aren't volunteers anymore. Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. The same goes for a lot of the work that is done on distributions...even the free ones.

These guys are doing some great work and it would really be a shame if it didn't continue. They are attempting to put together the kind of polished end user experience that Linux has never had. That's a good thing. It would probably be best if they could find another funding source besides end users because the Linux community has a pretty bad track record of supporting these kinds of efforts.

zxcvcxz5• 11 years ago

Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel.

Not by the Linux Foundation or Linux users. They're paid by third parties.

It's like MS pays it's employees to work on Linux but MS is still doing it for free.

ubertaco• 11 years ago

Before they published this blog post, I was mildly annoyed at having to type "$0" to download Elementary, but otherwise I dug their goal of making a clean and simple-to-use desktop environment.

Then they published this post -- and mind you, this is not the original version of this post (the original was worse).

With statements like:

We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software.

...and...

we feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement is worth some money.

...when all they've really done is:

* Build a stripped-down Gnome-family derivative Desktop Environment

* Build a custom-skinned wrapper around GTK that fits their custom DE (and expect app devs to fall in line with it)

* Write a few super-primitive apps in it (a Rhythmbox fork, a notepad clone, and a basic email client)

is just a -bit- overstating things, to say nothing of the difference between a desktop environment and "an entire operating system".

Then they say:

Most of the open source world is similar; Inkscape and GIMP only get money for development if users decide to give it to them.

without the slightest ounce of self-awareness to realize that neither of those projects make conscious design decisions to trick users into thinking they have to buy them. If I see a $____ box, my first assumption is that typing "0" has the same effect as typing "-1" or "aaaa": a validation error. It's a very close sibling of the "Sneak Into Basket"[1] UI "dark pattern".

These are the moves that turned me from a fan/advocate of elementary to a critic: not that their software was poor quality (the parts they had actually built were, for the most part, roughly as nice a UI as most other Ubuntu derivatives had in my opinion), but that their philosophy and attitude made them the kind of people I want to actively avoid promoting.

[1] http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/

nathanb• 11 years ago

I think there are some interesting dynamics at play here....

The post (even with the edits to remove unfortunate phrasing) seems really aggrieved at the community's expectation that open source projects are by definition free as in beer. Reading the comments on that article, it does seem true that many folks seem to feel entitled to a free copy of this software.

This is part of the culture and the ecosystem, though. It doesn't justify being an entitled jerk, but if you're going to operate in a particular space, you have to understand the culture behind that space.

(And for those on HN stating "this is why you don't see entrepreneurial activity in the Linux ecosystem"...well, how much entrepreneurial activity are you seeing in the Windows ecosystem these days? I think the Linux attitude may foster rather than hamper long-term innovation, because even when the money moves elsewhere there's still that core group of people working on projects for love and passion rather than for money.)

Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

Related Stories