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Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

Why does he have to pretend so hard that he is not trying to make money? Why the dodging? There's nothing wrong in making money. The only thing wrong here is this dishonesty.

As many others here said in the other thread, we would gladly pay for Ubuntu, if there was an easy, straight forward, transparent way to do so. I would much prefer that instead of Amazon ads (sorry, I mean "integration").

I already pay to be a "friend of eclipse" just because it's easy to do and they deserve it. Or even better, if Ubuntu one services were worth a thing, I would love to pay for it.

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The first result when I googled "donate ubuntu" was this link: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate

It's not super hard to do. If we all gave them $20 for each new version (something they truly deserve) they would not be in dire straits.

It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

Relying on the good graces of the user population hasn't prevented them from integrating Amazon advertisements, and won't likely prevent other bad decisions in the future.

Your comment reminded me of other Ubuntu incident - when they were stealing profit from Banshee (they changed banshee's amazon ref id to ubuntu's).

it's a bit presumptious to say who "owns" that profit, as both pieces are open source software that depend on each other for the music experience.

Without the Banshee developers, Ubuntu wouldn't have Banshee to ship, so it's not particularly debatable who deserves the lion's share. Especially considering Ubuntu's incredibly weak contributions to open source in general. What Ubuntu did there was tacky. If they had handled it better (discussing it with upstream and working out a profit sharing scheme), at least it would've been slightly less disgusting.

They did the same with Firefox.

> It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

How would they do that without breaking user experience? (and gpl licence).

GPL has zero influence. Please do the barest of research into licensing before invoking the GPL boogieman.

I think it would be difficult for them to start charging for the system at this point. Since everything is open source, if they added some kind of paid activation system or a charge to download the .iso or whatever, someone else would simply grab all of the code, remove the activation features and put it up somewhere else as "freebuntu" or whatever.

Yep, I would pay gladly for ubuntu. But dont make me work your affiliates when searching my own stuff.. then suggesting something else.

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