Canonical asks desktop users to “pay what you think Ubuntu is worth”
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Use Ubuntu and want to give some money for it? Great. Donate. Now there is a way where previously there was none.
Use Ubuntu and don't want to give money? Great. Don't donate.
Don't use Ubuntu? Carry on.
Also, it's not a traditional donation in the Mozilla Firefox sense because you cannot deduct it from your taxes because Canonical is a for-profit commercial organization.
I have done my best to buy hardware that I thought was to be well supported (on the desktop! because I thought power management would be "too hard", so I've given up on laptops), but as far as I can tell, nobody is home doing the QA and holding back releases (or, by any other means, making sure they work) because of regressions, specifically in the area of hardware/driver issues.
I don't need more half-broken crap. I need at least one thing that does work, all the time, across several releases, for three years at a stretch. I will pay for it. This is not represented among any of their available choices: even the one saying "support more hardware" suggests there is any level of support that is adequate. There is no such thing in end-user Linux-land (and I mean the kernel quite specifically) right now. That's not to fault Linux (although it may deserve it): nobody is withholding releases on the basis of quality on any one integration of hardware.
As much as I despise their corporate philosophical direction, Apple does this very well.
I say these things as a long time Ubuntu user (and still using it) who was pleased with the strides they were making in the mid-2000s, and still thinks they are the only Operating System seriously doing something about about omnibus Free-software usability today. I still have two Ubuntu workstations that are my primary sites of use, but now use it in begrudging concession to my professional needs and personal philosophy: not out of preference in any other dimension, least of which would be "quality."
This makes me sad, but I'm getting too old and impatient to put up with this.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Apple does a crapload of work to make sure that the one, tiny blessed subset of integrated hardware they select every so often works well during the span of its useful life. Sure, they lean on driver authors of suppliers pretty hard, something which few can do, but they are not nearly as hands-off as Microsoft: the buck stops with them, and a bad integration is Their Fault. And, on the flip side, if you are not an Apple supplier you don't give even two bits about supporting their operating system, for obvious reasons.
If there was a Dell distro and it Did Not Suck, I'd seriously consider it. I consider Ubuntu good-enough, so it could be Ubuntu but carefully tested and with divergent kernel and driver releases when appropriate.
> For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Doubtful, having not long ago possessing such a laptop and sitting next to a colleague in the current-day who has kept with the faith, although with increased grousing. He was, of course, careful with his hardware purchase, buying an ostensibly well-supported Thinkpad. The monitor on his desk still sits unused.
There is so much more to go wrong in common use cases that are eliminated on a desktop (because you can't even do some of them, or wouldn't want to). Wireless chipsets, power management, suspension and hibernation, fiddly bits like special softkeys, hot plugging displays, you name it. The weakest link on the desktop side is the video card, and this has proven to be bad enough for me -- crashes have come and gone for me with each Ubuntu release on a pretty plain-jane NVIDIA card.
The bigger thing currently is to simply buy something and know it will 100% work with at least current Ubuntu. That's unfortune, but it's true.
If you scroll down you will see a screenshot from Ubuntu which says, "Pay what you think it's worth" which is followed with subtitle text of, "Millions agree that Ubuntu is a great piece of software. But how much do you really think it's worth?"
Nowhere does the article or title imply that you cannot download Ubuntu regardless of your donation. However, Ubuntu themselves has chosen wording which alludes to asking people to pay.
Given that Canonical is commercial I very much doubt that they are even allowed to take donations.
But... that download page http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/questions?distro=desk...
A) makes it a pain to drag everything to $0 (8 sliders to drag) B) makes it seem like you're getting a t-shirt too C) makes me feel bad for downloading it for free. D) is any of that money going to the Linux Foundation? It's not clear - if not, shame on them.
What problems do people have with the free ATI drivers?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r...
I'd be shocked if they'd made up that huge gap in 3 months.
Do the free ATI drivers get 60fps (or even 30fps @ 1080p resolution) for most full screen games? If so, could you tell me which model of card you are achieving this with?
For example all Xbox Live Arcade games are required to have a trial (demo) which can be seamlessly upgraded to the full version at anytime. Every trial is required to award the player an Xbox Live achievement and Xbox Live Avatar Item at some point. When receiving either a pop-up occurs saying "You've earned <X>, unlock the full game now to keep it". Or something to that effect. Then of course there is a final upsell at the end of the trial.
It does make sense for Windows and OS X users :)
I'm a developer. I don't give a shit about a fancy desktop. I just want my hardware to work good with the O.S. and for updates not to wreck my system. Why? Because I just want to write code, run what services and daemons I need, and read shit on the internet.
It's really fn frustrating. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years solid now when I ditched Windows. I'd be willing to donate to the two areas I highlighted, but if shit didn't get better....
Edit: The page should a "make the desktop less awesome" side of the slider. If Unity is what they mean by "awesome", it should be slid back.
I haven't used Debian after switching to Ubuntu pretty early on. These days I stick to LTS on servers but can't resist upgrading to the latest shiny stuff every 6 months. I've had issues with upgrades and assumed that if I had stayed in the LTS path only it would be smoother.
By the way Ubuntu releases an LTS release every two years and the last 3 Debian stable releases have happened at 2 year intervals, so the two seem comparable.
That being said, Debian stable can sometimes feel a little... stale. Sorry. Couldn't help myself.
I don't know what the situation is like now, since I haven't used linux on my laptop for a couple years, but if I were to go back, I would want something like Debian stable, but with an updated browser.
I was running a testing desktop, and X updated in a way that broke the proprietary nVidia drivers (nVidia's fault -- not Debian's.) That was quite annoying to suddenly have to fix. Those types of issues (though rare, even in testing) would be nice to avoid.
For a more general solution you could look into apt-pinning, but there are some downsides depending on which way you go about it.
What confused me about that page was this:
"Pay what you think it's worth" is a question based on past experience... you either have no experience and think the value is zero or you already have experience and think it's worth $x.
But then all of the options were very clearly angled towards the future and answering a different question "Where would you like us to invest?".
It baffled me as without downloading and using Ubuntu I couldn't give you an indication of what it is worth to me right now, and I couldn't say which part I felt needed investment in the future. Even if I were a regular user of Ubuntu and was upgrading from one LTS to another, how would I know which bit now needs investment until after I'd seen what has changed?
I also could not see any indication that were I to have slid a slider one way, that this guarantees that is where my money will go. In the UK, organisations that take donations are bound to only use such funds for the purpose in which they've been taken, less reasonable administration costs.
Canonical being based in the UK, does that mean that they are creating different accounts per-slider and ring-fencing the funds solely for that use? I doubted it.
I did the only thing I felt was rational and downloaded without a contribution.
To me a more logical thing would be to ask for a contribution after I knew there was value there.
In my case that means to let me install it, see whether it solves my multi-monitor problem, and then suggest I contribute.
Or it could mean that in the support forums or interfaces if a solution removes pain, ask me for money right then... I'll happily give it.
At those points I know the value and know where I want to see future investment. But at download time? Nah, I know nothing.
If you're going to ask for something at the moment of download then a simple tip jar would do the trick. The question of "Where should we invest in the future?" should only be asked after someone is using Ubuntu.
Personally I would be happy to have a monthly subscription to simply keep Ubuntu improving, even without any additional value on top of what they already provide. I realize this could be done by simply donating monthly. However, in a subscription model they could probably set up a two-way communication channel between them and paying customers, to both help refine their goals and estimate how well they're being met, in a more continuous manner than random donations at download time.
Debian is an actual nonprofit that can accept donations, while Canonical is a for-profit company to which you can only give voluntary payments masquerading as donations?
These people (we) are willing to use Ubuntu, since it is pretty much the same thing, but they (we) will never go out and actively support the Ubuntu project as we believe that Debian is more deserving of our support.
These "donations" aren't just there to thank developers for past works, but also to equip the distro so that it can improve and continue to push the envelope its way.
Ubuntu's users chose to download and install Ubuntu, not Debian, probably because they like whatever Ubuntu does that you find so insignificant and that other distros aren't doing. I suspect that you too are running Ubuntu, not Debian, for the same reasons.
When Ubuntu asks for money, that's because Ubuntu needs it to keep doing those insignificant Ubuntu stuff, that made you choose to install it, not Debian. So, don't bring up Debian.
When Linux Mint started their own distro, they didn't go all the way down to Debian. Ubuntu probably did something worthwhile, that Mint would rather not do themselves. But people who installed Mint didn't install Ubuntu, so when Mint asks for donations, it's for Mint stuff. Let's not bring up Ubuntu.
This is written on Debian's donation page (http://www.debian.org/donations):
While all donations are welcome, it is especially hoped that any businesses that make money through Debian (CD manufacturers, support companies, or even businesses that rely on Debian for day to day operations) will contribute a percentage of their profit to help make Debian the best OS it can be.
Get it? help make Debian the best OS it can be. Let's not bring up GNU or Linux.
If Ubuntu sold vouchers that allowed me to buy software at a slight discount, rather than connecting to Paypal each time, I'd pay for it. The best part is that it has the numbers and the products to make it work for them as well.
I suspect that most Ubuntu users can donate 16$ for the project.
If you think Ubuntu provides you with $X in value but you literally do not have $X to your name, well, I'm not sure how it could be providing $X to you, then.
You could be totally broke and feel like Ubuntu has the potential to provide you with $X in value (by helping you get a job, for example). You could just donate when the value is realized, not before.
Maybe you didn't mean that you literally don't have $X, but instead meant that you might not feel like it's worth paying $X for what you get out of it. In that case your choice of X was simply too high.
I don't really like the phrase "Pay what you think it's worth" for two reasons.
One of my issues with it is that it's easy to think of it as a fixed impersonal price rather than something that varies from person to person at any given time.
The other issue is that, as a developer, I do NOT want users paying what my products are worth to them. I want them to pay less than that, so they get something out of the deal. I want people to be better off for having acquired my software, I do not want to extract 100% of the value they get out of it in exchange.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.
Imagine I have disposable income of $0 and I currently use Ubuntu. By your reasoning, Ubuntu is worthless to me. However, let's say that if you offered me $1 to stop using Ubuntu, I would say say "no". We can safely conclude that Ubuntu is worth more than $1 to me, even though I don't have $1 to pay for it.
Ability to pay doesn't always equal value created. If I like take walks in a national park, I obviously derive value from that resource, but I don't pay anything for it and it doesn't allow me to generate any additional income.
To answer the question, no it is not unethical to use free software for free when you cannot afford to donate. Canonical is not expecting you to pay for it, merely making it clearer that you are able to pay for it if you wish. This comes on the heels of the outcry over Amazon search being built-in, with people asking if Ubuntu is hurting for cash, why is it not easier to give them money?
Yes, but if you're a citizen you "pay" for it in a legally obligated way, so that payment tells an observer nothing about your preferences.
I spoke imprecisely, but my point was that there are resources which are free at the point of use which still have value to the user. Perhaps a national park was a bad example, I should just have said "the countryside".
(Oh, and in case you were hoping to read this as typical bleeding-heart liberal craptrap, I live in 80 square feet and use a computer that is looking forward to the coming Core2 family of processors. IDE drives and what's a DDR? Is that like RamBus?)
If you can support the open source projects you use and want to stick around, that'd be good. At a shallow level, it will make them better.
But if you ask an open source maintainer whether a cash-strapped college student or a third-world citizen should avoid using their software because they their donation money could be used for a different purpose..? I hope the answer is no. In fact, I hope the answer extends to "Bill Gates is welcome to use my code without compensating me. Obviously it'd be nice if he did, though."
I'm willing to bet an imaginary nickel that the OSS devs I know would actually be pretty surprised if they received anything at all.
I just want to see the affiliate links go away now :)
What will the donation amount of be used for? More marketing - which I understand is equally necessary, but unworthy for me right now - vs things like hiring and paying developers?
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/how-mu...
Who are the developers in Ubuntu working on it ? In fact, ARE THERE any developers working on it. I would really appreciate some increased transparency here - because as I see it, there are lots of contenders for my money: including LinuxMint, which IMHO needs money more desperately.
That's why the packages end in .cpg: "Canonical PackaGe"?
As a Ubuntu user, I like the Ubuntu Software Center and being able to install Skype and Dropbox through it and not having to scour the web for packages compatible with my system. I like some Unity features such as the dash and the HUD, because they greatly simplify discoverability of features that I do not use on a daily basis. I like the fact that Canonical certifies Ubuntu on a variety of hardware and I can therefore purchase my next laptop or server with the knowledge that my preferred OS will work fine on it.
I could go on, but I don't think there is any need - it's pretty clear that Canonical makes a lot of things happen apart from building .deb packages.
(I do use Ubnutu, BTW, but regret the decision on a regular basis. I especially like waiting 15 seconds to get a shell prompt because it's checking for package updates to display while I'm logging in. The 15 seconds after each typo'd command is also enjoyable. "Did you mean to install the package sl?" No. No I did not. Ever. </rant>)
unset -f command_not_found_handleI really like it when motd just randomly became some convoluted set of scripts.
That's a much wider gap than I expected.
Oh wait, that's what I do.