If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.
edit: typo
By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.
I would prefer to pay a reasonable subscription fee with a support contract which is also not illegal, but benefits all parties.
I run a small software company myself. We're selling our software on the internet. But our website focuses on getting people to download the free trial first. The "asking for money" is then done once the trial period ends.
It's already hard to get people to download your stuff for free. With obviously visible download buttons.
If we did what Elementary is doing we would be closing our shop rather soon.
Yet some projects still squeak out some money: Synergy, DOSBox Turbo, etc.
_that's why it won't work_
Freedom 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."
Does this line make a program un-GPL?
exit(0) if Time.now > Time.new(2016,11,15,0,0,0)From what I can remember, there was never a time where they disallowed a way of downloading the OS for free, they just made it more difficult to figure out over time.
First of all, it's a rather large download, so you're probably going to close the website as soon as you click on the download button. Second of all, to consume the product in this case, you have to install it. And yet again, after you do so, if you get greeted with the "donate" window right away, you're going to dismiss it because you still haven't tested out the product.
So, what you need is a timer, something that says like "after 30 minutes (or an hour, or two hours) of usage, display the window", but that would require the OS to make calls to external servers without the user consent, and, because we are talking about a Linux-based operating system, people would be complaining that this is a a privacy violation.
Not necessarily. It's not like you expect the buyer to do a careful analysis of what it's worth before they pay. You can usually decide this sort of thing based on very quick impressions. Also, there's the aspect of it just seeming nicer to ask after the download has happened. Then it's clear that you already have the product, now it's up to you to decide what to pay for it, if anything at all. Here people have been tricked into thinking they had to pay and begrudge the author.
Really? On most sites that I visit, I 'Save As' every link that I care to download, so that there is no separate tab to close. (But maybe you were referring only to this specific site.) Maybe the solution is just to make sure that there's more of interest on your download page than just the download button?
If I pay nothing, I don't pay.
I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"
It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.
edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.
They do serve a purpose though.
Stare into the abyss etc.
No thank you, I'd rather use Mint or Ubuntu if I want an easy distro.
Comparing that to GNOME, where everything is so damn big that it wastes half of my screen and KDE where the default apps are usually bloated and confusing and can do way too many things, I call Pantheon as a win for the developers.
EDIT: Also, one neat trick that I've never seen any other terminal emulator doing other than Pantheon Terminal, is that you get a desktop notification every time you're not focused on the terminal when it finishes its job. For example, let's say I do something like "sudo apt install netbeans". Since the download is large, I'm going to focus on something else in the meantime and I'll get a desktop notification when the installation is finished.