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It seems your example justifies the reasoning behind Elementary's change. You can select $0 and continue with automatic updates if you would like, the purpose

It seems your example justifies the reasoning behind Elementary's change. You can select $0 and continue with automatic updates if you would like, the purpose of the change was to add an option to users who may consider paying the developer now they've gotten to use the application. Previously the only time you could pay was before downloading. Now, if you wanted to disperse $99 across every application, you could do so. Or $50. Or $25. Just pay each developer what you will.

brudgers 9y ago
People will always find justifications for monetizing suck. But this passage from the article captures the fundamental psychology: By not including paid apps in “Update All”, there is a bit of a convenience tax if you choose not to pay continually. We know that nag screens are inconvenient. They’re meant to be. We know that paying is also inconvenient, so we have to level the playing field a bit. Basically, the developers see themselves in competition with their users, e.g. the sports metaphor. That's how features that are deliberately contrary to the user's interests get rationalized. It helps that it is easier to make software suck than to make it valuable enough that users will pay up front. I'd put it this way, to be morally consistent the developers of Elementary OS apps probably ought to donate a large fraction of whatever they collect to all those open source projects that live upstream upon which the Elementary OS ecosystem depends. Think Ubuntu, Debian, FSF, and the thousands of other projects that allow Elementary OS to work. I mean $100 spread across the ecosystem is probably less than $0.01 per contributing package. To me, the moral claim looks weaker than it was in the days of shareware and paid tools and operating systems. It's even weaker than a moral claim based on the iOS app store today.

brudgers 9y ago

People will always find justifications for monetizing suck. But this passage from the article captures the fundamental psychology: By not including paid apps in “Update All”, there is a bit of a convenience tax if you choose not to pay continually. We know that nag screens are inconvenient. They’re meant to be. We know that paying is also inconvenient, so we have to level the playing field a bit. Basically, the developers see themselves in competition with their users, e.g. the sports metaphor. That's how features that are deliberately contrary to the user's interests get rationalized. It helps that it is easier to make software suck than to make it valuable enough that users will pay up front. I'd put it this way, to be morally consistent the developers of Elementary OS apps probably ought to donate a large fraction of whatever they collect to all those open source projects that live upstream upon which the Elementary OS ecosystem depends. Think Ubuntu, Debian, FSF, and the thousands of other projects that allow Elementary OS to work. I mean $100 spread across the ecosystem is probably less than $0.01 per contributing package. To me, the moral claim looks weaker than it was in the days of shareware and paid tools and operating systems. It's even weaker than a moral claim based on the iOS app store today.