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Tangentially-related rant (since the author is pushing Ubuntu): I wish Canonical would offer an 'End-User Desktop Support' offering. Right now Ubuntu Advantage

Tangentially-related rant (since the author is pushing Ubuntu): I wish Canonical would offer an 'End-User Desktop Support' offering. Right now Ubuntu Advantage is available for $150 per year, but that's only for enterprise (you have to order at least 50 units). I think it would be interesting if Canonical offered an equivalent product for home users, understanding that the $/year would be higher. That would give all the people moving to Ubuntu an option to support the people making the OS. I do see that donations are accepted (the prompt is on the _Your download will begin shortly…_ page), so at least there's that!

cwyers 8y ago
You'll never get end users to pay more per seat than an enterprise product. You just need to find a way to make the end user product sufficiently worse that enterprises won't care about the price difference, they'll just buy what they need.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  When you have a minimum of 50 seats, it's not really $150 per seat. It's $7,500 + $150 per seat over 50 $150 for a single seat would be significantly less.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    What value prop are you going to offer to get a consumer to pay $150 a year for Linux support? Enterprises will pay it because they have a value prop and because Windows seats aren't free. From a consumer's point of view, Windows _is_ free.
hsivonen 8y ago
Single-seat support used to be available for Ubuntu. I paid for that in roughly the 2010-2012 time frame. It was useless, and I don't really blame Canonical: Consider how much of a competent person's time the annual price back then, 190 euros, could buy. Not much. If you want to support them monetarily, the donation thing covers that. If you want to pay for them to provide support for you, what do you expect "support" to mean and at what cost? The trope that if you pay for Open Source support, you get to affect bug fixing priorities doesn't work at the money levels that individuals (except maybe ones who have the kind of money Shuttleworth has) are willing to pay. But even for just advice on how to perform a task or resolve a problem, if you can't get the answer right away using a Web search engine, chances are that the solution needs a competent person to pay attention for a longer period of time than your expected annual per-seat price pays for.

cwyers 8y ago

You'll never get end users to pay more per seat than an enterprise product. You just need to find a way to make the end user product sufficiently worse that enterprises won't care about the price difference, they'll just buy what they need.

jjeaff 8y ago
When you have a minimum of 50 seats, it's not really $150 per seat. It's $7,500 + $150 per seat over 50 $150 for a single seat would be significantly less.
- cwyers 8y ago
  What value prop are you going to offer to get a consumer to pay $150 a year for Linux support? Enterprises will pay it because they have a value prop and because Windows seats aren't free. From a consumer's point of view, Windows _is_ free.

hsivonen 8y ago

Single-seat support used to be available for Ubuntu. I paid for that in roughly the 2010-2012 time frame. It was useless, and I don't really blame Canonical: Consider how much of a competent person's time the annual price back then, 190 euros, could buy. Not much. If you want to support them monetarily, the donation thing covers that. If you want to pay for them to provide support for you, what do you expect "support" to mean and at what cost? The trope that if you pay for Open Source support, you get to affect bug fixing priorities doesn't work at the money levels that individuals (except maybe ones who have the kind of money Shuttleworth has) are willing to pay. But even for just advice on how to perform a task or resolve a problem, if you can't get the answer right away using a Web search engine, chances are that the solution needs a competent person to pay attention for a longer period of time than your expected annual per-seat price pays for.