Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
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Sure, Apple made some money from selling OS X at $129. It's making less now. But new OS sales were never the reason for Apple to remain closed source. That had more to do with branding/marketing. Not many people remember that one of the reasons Steve killed the affiliate program is that the Mac affiliates were making better machines than Apple, and people were buying them instead of a "Mac". That reduces Apple's revenue, but more importantly dilutes their brand.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a very different brand proposition from the start. Open is their brand. But so is "convenience", and what could be more convenient than a machine for which you don't have to do research to find out if all the drivers will work?
To make Canonical in a hardware direction under the Canonical brand, at a level to compete with existing hardware manufacturers, would take a fantastic amount of investment.
They are making steps in partnering with hardware manufacturers, see the recent Dell linux laptop, and the OEM engineering services they provide for e.g. set top box manufacturers.
But I think it's unlikely you will see Ubuntu brand hardware any time soon.
Cheap and cheerful (read: shoddy) hardware would quickly damage the Ubuntu brand, and the good hardware is locked up tight by the big brands. Canonical would need to put in some serious volume or R&D of their own to get good hardware that would lead to a viable Ubuntu hardware brand.
Ubuntu users, at least at the moment, are quite picky about the specs of their PCs.
Dell (or whoever does this) could win considerable dev/geek sympathy and mindshare with a move like this.
Great idea. Hey, this is Y-Combinator - somebody get on it!
The netbook: wireless driver for the builtin never worked. I had to buy (and carry around) a USB wifi stick.
The laptop: fingerprint scanner has never worked.
There may be workarounds, but the whole point of buying from an ubuntu-specific vendor was that I shouldn't have to mess around with figuring out why my hardware doesn't work.
So by Apple killing this the consumer loses the option to use better machines?
Personally, I wish that I could buy Apple hardware with OSX as an added "option". I could knock $129 off the price by using my own OS. But, truthfully, it's not about price. By being able to use my own bootloader and my own OS^1, I could avoid the sort of hoop jumping longtime Mac users (e.g. John Battelle and Rob Pike) have recently described.
1. At least, having Apple make this easy, not make the user resort to extensive hackery to do it.
Apple makes beautiful hardware. That part of Apple has not changed. The mounting annoyances, if you haven't noticed, all come from Apple's efforts to lock down and exert total control over software.
The idea of paying for Ubuntu, as code, only shows how far afield some Linux users have drifted. There is a difference between paying for support and paying for a license to use some (free) code. If you need help, pay for support. Suggestions to force everyone else to pay for use of free code because you need help make little sense. Is that what this is, or have I misread it?
http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/sputnik
Donations work fine, thats how the community keeps going. You're paying the Ubuntu high level team to continue what they're doing and helping cover the costs. If you like what Ubuntu does, go donate. If they're looking at 3rd party affiliates then maybe they're not getting enough donations, maybe they've been approached and think it's a good fit.
I'm also curious about why you take as a given that money needs to be distributed to "Jack John Johnson"? There's certainly nothing in the licenses that forces it, and when Apple takes BSD software and sells it nobody thinks that's out of line. When RedHat charges for RHEL nobody complains either, even though most of the software is open source as well. What line is Ubuntu crossing here?
They make decisions you may like or may not like (moving the window controls to the left..) - but at least for me it was time to go - and I don't look back.
The main selling point of RHEL is the stability and long term support that makes software vendors like Oracle comfortable supporting it as a platform. If you install CentOS you get that, perfectly free and open source. How is that not giving RHEL away for free?
I won't however change my opinion. They did push the state of it forward, but so did Knoppix in many ways, and a fairly large amount of other distros. Are they all products? No, they're projects, with varying levels of success. It's a great platform, but I don't think that classing it as a product is helpful. It's a community project, approaching it like RHEL wouldn't work, they have completely different aims.
My argument isn't that Ubuntu is a quick paint gloss improvement, it's that they've taken the core work and improved it rapidly (although Unity could be argued) and teamed it with their biggest marketable quality which is that they've built a community around their work.
Do they deserve money? Yes, of course, thats why they take donations. Should they sell it as a product, as an actual thing? I don't think so.
(if you're working for Ubuntu, I love you and I'm not being mean!)
I actually wasn't arguing if they should charge for it or not, I don't really have an opinion there. My objections to your comment were:
1) Ubuntu isn't just a community, it's also a product and a successful one. You can download their new distribution every 6 months and get a lot of value out of it directly without ever engaging with the community. 2) If Canonical were to charge for Ubuntu, that does not mean they need to distribute money to any developers. It's certainly not required by any of the licenses of the software they package or even any of the customs of the community (see RHEL).
I would assume, were Canonical to start selling Ubuntu, that some part of the profits would find its way upstream.
That's not to say the Ubuntu devs don't create anything of additional value.
I initially thought that the idea to integrate Amazon was a very bad thing - but I think it could be useful. I use Amazon for many purchases, with the shopping lens search results from Amazon will be available via the launcher.
However, I think the lens should be easy to disable - especially since user data will be sent to a third party by default. At present the package can be removed, but this might not be intuitive enough for some users [1]
I also think the store / aggregator associated with shopping lens should be configurable to avoid providing Amazon with a monopoly over other sellers.
[1] sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
To find that, you have to go to the home page, click on "community", then "get involved", and then find the little "donate" tab. I went looking the other day and gave up.
Put a friggin' button in the dock on every machine that shows whether you've donated recently. If they can put Amazon affiliate links in the main interface, they can just ask me directly for money.
See: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-...
Not so hard, isn't it?
IFF then there is a wide-scale uptake then there is warrant for auto-install of those features.
you -> developer
you -> advertising company -> developer
I think the simplistic view of Canonicals business model is the problem with the article.
As I've said before, I don't see how this kind on monetisation would be practical for Ubuntu unless they took chunks of their software (such as Unity) and made them closed source.
If there was a sticker price attached to Ubuntu and an activation system (ala Windows) somebody would simply fork the code minus the activation and make a free clone.
Basically the same as Redhat/CentOS.
Their best way of monetising the desktop is probably to make their app store less crappy and get some paid apps in there.
If they can't get enough third parties involved , maybe they can get the ball rolling with their own proprietary paid apps.
Their main customer base right now is probably developers, so a good start might be a nice GUI DB admin tool and a good debugging proxy (ala Fiddler) and they could start monetising tomorrow.
It's difficult to envisage charging for the distribution ending well, but you can already pay Canonical for support if you'd like to, and I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you how to disable the "advertising". TBH, though, I'm not sure how Canonical's relationship with Amazon search is any different from what Mozilla do with Google search.
Why not?
If you don't get support for that subscription, I can't see a difference worth $350 between RHEL self-support subscription and CentOS.
EDIT: ate a word
EDIT 2: self-support desktop subscription is just $49. But the point is the same: no support.
* Access to the RHEL repositories, with faster updates than CentOS or alternatives.
* Ability to upgrade to supported tier.
* Possibly: access to RHN pages with their forums, documentation, etc?
None of which would be huge advantages to me, but I can totally see the potential value.
Um, sure you can. Ubuntu, RedHat, and Slackware are quite successful at this already. Pat Volkerding has been doing it for as long as linux has existed (Slackware). Yes, someone can distribute the binaries, but they can't use the {Ubuntu, RedHat,Slackware} name.
Let me propose you give money to Debian instead.
I think "once every 6 months" is too often, I'd be happier if Ubuntu was released once per year but better tested.
Personally I find the new feature interesting, because I already use the DuckDuckGo !-Notation to search Amazon all the time.
> 1) make a donation
> 2) sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
> 3) grab a tasty beverage1) Donations aren't a sustainable revenue model, and won't prevent Ubuntu from taking equally user-hostile actions in the future. What they need is a sustainable revenue model where users are the customer.
2) How is this different than the crapware that comes installed with some OEM Windows PCs? How is that a model to be emulated? What happens when a feature like this can't just be installed with apt-get?
3) Water would almost certainly be healthier.
Apple used to be the reliable alternative to the Microsoft hegemony. They're squandering that position, and we desperately need something like Ubuntu -- consumer focused, polished, and as easy to use as Mac OS X (or at least, Ubuntu is a lot closer to that ideal than Linux has previously been).
For Ubuntu to maintain a consumer focus, they need the consumers to be their customers, not their product. Let me buy Ubuntu, or buy Ubuntu hardware.
Is it so wrong that I don't want "free" things if that means I'm the product and not the customer? Is that really such a hard market opportunity to exploit?
I'd rather pay money to not see them. Problem solved.
Similarly, certain definite projects like "get X functionality into Y application" could be valid targets for a kickstarter-like projects. Paid-for code released under GPL. Why not ? This measure would be best reserved for unfun tasks, something no one wants to do.
At present, the Amazon results are only present if you do use the shopping lens or perform an open search. As long as there is an easy way to disable the Amazon results, I don't have a problem with it.
Or even one dollar a day?
Look into what advertisers are paying, I'm betting you're not willing to match their price.
Also, they're not being paid every time someone opens their browser. They're paid if someone searches in the Unity lens, sees something they like, clicks on the link, and buys something within 24 hours from Amazon. Amazon's commission rates are < 5% if I remember correctly.
I think they'll be lucky to make $100k from it.
If we consider they have about 15 million users, that's about 45 million dollars. But maybe they have other sources of revenue.
I don't think that same behavior is going to be exhibited in a Unity lens, certainly not with the same frequency. I also doubt the click rate too.