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Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

102 points by LukeB_UK 11y ago

nathanb 11y ago
I think there are some interesting dynamics at play here.... The post (even with the edits to remove unfortunate phrasing) seems really aggrieved at the community's expectation that open source projects are by definition free as in beer. Reading the comments on that article, it does seem true that many folks seem to feel entitled to a free copy of this software. This is part of the culture and the ecosystem, though. It doesn't justify being an entitled jerk, but if you're going to operate in a particular space, you have to understand the culture behind that space. (And for those on HN stating "this is why you don't see entrepreneurial activity in the Linux ecosystem"...well, how much entrepreneurial activity are you seeing in the Windows ecosystem these days? I think the Linux attitude may foster rather than hamper long-term innovation, because even when the money moves elsewhere there's still that core group of people working on projects for love and passion rather than for money.)
realusername 11y ago
It would be interesting to see if the new dialog box is improving the number of users paying for the software, but I guess they are waiting for more data to see that. Appart for that, I have absolutely no problem paying for Elementary, in my opinion is the best Linux distribution and by far. Everything is really polished and well done.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  > Everything is really polished and well done. I'm using Elementary OS right now. It's pretty, but it's really no more polished than Ubuntu. In fact, it just mostly uses the same Ubuntu repositories. That's not a bad thing, but it's worth keeping in mind that Elementary OS is as good as it is because it's building on Ubuntu.
  - neuropie 11y ago
    I wonder how Canonical feel about Elementary making money off an operating system that receives updates from archive.ubuntu.com
    - NhanH 11y ago
      It really doesn't matter how they feel though.
      - neuropie 11y ago
        It all seems a bit similar to Red Star OS.
    - Mikeb85 11y ago
      Probably the same way the Debian folks feel about Canonical making money from an operating system built on Debian.
    - superuser2 11y ago
      >making money I highly doubt they're turning a profit.
mirimir 11y ago
If they accepted Bitcoins, I would have paid some USD. But mirimir has no credit cards.
- markild 11y ago
  They do, though...
  - mirimir 11y ago
    You're right! I must have missed it.
jasonkester 11y ago
This is completely baffling. Just remove the option to download your thing for free. You know it has value. You just spent a thousand words explaining why you think people should pay money for your thing. There's an easy way to get them to do that: Charge money for your thing. No need to guilt anybody. No need to apologize. You built an entire operating system. Those cost money. Give your users the option of paying you, not using your thing, or (if you absolutely can't detach yourself from this irrational need to give your work away for free) building it from source.
- detaro 11y ago
  Removing the option to download GPL software for free seems like a pointless exercise... Also: they build a set of desktop apps for Ubuntu and did some other polishing work. Not to say that isn't hard and important work, but it also isn't "building an entire operating system".
  - jasonkester 11y ago
    Not at all. The "download" we're talking about here is the binary (unless I'm mistaken). People with $10 in their bank account and the ability to calculate the value of half an hour of their time will happily pay to avoid fighting dependencies to compile this thing from source. The angry entitled people commenting on this poor guy's blog can download the source for free. (And to your edit, people who think that there is not $10 of value added can simply not install it.) Everybody wins.
    - mahouse 11y ago
      As easy as googling "elementary os iso download" and there will probably be some website with all ISOs ready to be downloaded for free.
    - derefr 11y ago
      People tend to use Linux for mass installs, though. Once you say "it costs $10 to download this software", you have to ask "but what if I want to download it again? Or, conversely, download once but install onto 1000 PCs?" The fully-correct-and-flexible answer is, sadly, the Microsoft-like enterprisey one: to have a user account and charge the user for a multi-seat license to the software, which provides a product key entered during the installation. That way, you can reuse the same installation image as much as you want, but each activation has a cost.
markild 11y ago
Interesting read. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard about elementary. Though, not directly related to their payment model, I wish they would more clearly state that they're a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I couldn't "quickly" find any info on it anywhere on their site, so I had to find out from Wikipedia. I guess this has something to do with their target audience, and the way the sell this as an alternative to Windows or OS X. Somewhat related to their payment model, I would very much like to see them contribute some of what they're making back to Ubuntu/Debian, if they don't already.
- njloof 11y ago
  It's also unclear from their homepage why I would want yet another OS/UI combo. What are the advantages? Does it run any apps? I'm definitely not paying $10 sight unseen. Maybe a 30-day trial would be a better model before asking for payment.
  - narrowrail 11y ago
    Why would they need to offer a trial? Just type in 0$ and download or just download the torrent directly (they default to a torrent anyway, at least when choosing 0$).
    - lukaslalinsky 11y ago
      Because it's not clear that you can actually type in $0 and if you do you are a "cheater". Right know it asks for money, before you even see what it is and what it does.
thewhitetulip 11y ago
This has already been discussed on HN before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995
- staz 11y ago
  Yes this is a 3 months old blog post, don't know why it's getting frontpaged again
  - misframer 11y ago
    It's quite normal for submissions to be reposted and make it to the front page again.
    - thewhitetulip 11y ago
      Yes, it can come on the front page: what worried me the most was that people were commenting on it as if it is for the first time it has arrived on HN! Time travel!
nubela 11y ago
Why don't you include the payment WITHIN the system? I wouldn't pay before I try eOS, it is only if I stick and use it, will I consider paying.
- toyg 11y ago
  I'd go further and say that opensource distributions should all have a standard customizable package that will "nag" users after a certain amount of hours from first boot. The package could spring a pop-up if X is running, or send an email to root@ (or whatever the "admin" user is). If done well, I bet a lot of users wouldn't mind dropping $5 or $10 -- probably more than you get by doing the occasional donation drive. In fact, some good soul could get together the main actors (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch) and set up a shared infrastructure that will provide a common flow for this revenue stream (payment UI, merchant accounts etc), sharing fixed costs.
  - rspeer 11y ago
    ... just like all those people who paid for WinZip and mIRC?
    - toyg 11y ago
      Before Microsoft included decent compression facilities in Windows, a lot of people did in fact pay for WinZip. I bet some still do, considering it's still on sale -- something that cannot be said for most Linux distributions.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I highly doubt many people were paying for WinZip or WinRAR, given that they're a running gag in the IT sector (just like paying for Total Commander). But I'd love to see data on it, if anyone has some.
        dchest 11y ago
        Revenues of WinZip Computing (WinZip) 2003 - $25,259,000 2004 - $24,928,000 2005 - $22,700,000 (from Corel's IPO filings, http://blog.goodsol.com/2006/04/winzip_and_jasc.html http://blog.goodsol.com/2006/04/winzip_and_jasc.html)
rlpb 11y ago
It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software has a huge cost", but there's no mention of the money they're collecting going to the developers of Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams that surely together comprise the majority of the work that they're referring to. Basing their wording on the huge development cost of the entire work, rather than what they're adding, seems misleading to me since what they're adding is a tiny proportion of the entire cost they're referring to; yet they seem to want to take the money as justified by the entire cost. That's not to say that Elementary OS developers aren't adding value. Clearly they are if users are downloading from them, and it's fine to ask users to pay for that.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  Consider also, quite importantly, that a large volume of the work done on any Linux-based operating system is and has been done entirely without money changing hands.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Only when one forgets that most of those developers: - were payed to work on GNU/Linux by their employers - had a different source of income - were students with their parents paying for their bills - were building a portfolio for a job change So money did change hands, even if indirectly.
    - zxcvcxz 11y ago
      You're being pedantic. The users point is that neither the Linux foundation, Linux Users, or Linus Torvalds pays people to contribute to the kernel. While one company may pay its employees to write code for the Linux kernel, that company is still writing the code and contributing it to Linux for free.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        The employees salary is not free, or are you suggesting those employees don't enter the hours into the companies accounting system?
orik 11y ago
Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. I'd like point out a couple of quotes. https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.elementaryos.org/post/110645528530/payments https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.eleme... >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. Elementary's self-important attitude has and continues to completely baffle me. People joke about ElementaryOS being just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell, because it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell. Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools, and yet they made the argument that the end user is 'cheating the system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for free. If Elementary wanted to take the high ground, they'd introduce a Humble Bundle style payment system split between the various foundations they're building off of. Maybe the defaults would look something like 30% to the Linux Foundation, 20% to the FSF, 20% to Debian, 20% to Ubuntu, and 10% to themselves.
- ikurei 11y ago
  I don't disagree with what you said, but I'd like to comment on a few points. >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. (Auch, reading that hurt; still...) There they didn't say users are cheating for not paying them, but for not paying in general. Also consider that The Linux Foundation, the FSF, Canonical... all have way bigger communities and visibiliy, and relations with big companies and other ways of obtaining economical support. Elementary depends only on their reduced user base. > it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell. Well, yes. But they still put a lot of work into it. It rest on the shoulders of the GTK and Gnome giants, but they have still put a lot of work. Describing them that way isn't, imho, fair at all. Apart from the Pantheon's surface, they've been working on libraries as Contracts and Granite GTK. I've no idea if they're complicated behemoths or ridiculously thin work-of-an-afternoon additions to GNU/Linux. I think I would be fine with it if they had just mentioned "hey, our hard work depends on the hard work of this fellas, consider donating to them too!". Specially if really they are not making any profit as of yet, I don't think it's that bad to ask for the funding to continue your work from the people who enjoy it. PD: I'm writing this from Elementary, which I use on two computers. In this one I ended up going back to Awesome WM, but I keep Pantheon on the other. I really like it, even if it isn't an incredible distance away from Xubuntu. Although I'm not particularly wealthy, I'll consider donating a few bucks to Elementary. It is not the first OSS project I donate to, but I'll also consider donating to it's upstream. PD2: I was partly playing devil's advocate. Even as an Elementary user, I didn't particularly like this post.
joosters 11y ago
But it's entirely the wrong time to try and charge customers. How can I decide how much to pay for it before I've even downloaded the thing? (Also, the shading on the payment buttons is so minor that it is very difficult to see which one is selected on my iPad screen)
- SunShiranui 11y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't we pay for most products before actually being able to use them?
  - diggan 11y ago
    A normal, physical product, yeah sure. But most SaaS, Baas or any other software project usually have a demo/trial for you to use before deciding if it's worth paying for.
b3lvedere 11y ago
Hey, it's your OS. Do whatever you want with it as long as you respect the GPL. You do not need to explain that. I've tried Elementary a bit. Didn't like it. Sorry.
jitix 11y ago
It's not bad that they are asking for money. Although the current norm is to give away the binaries for free, I think they can and should charge for the service they are providing by building the binaries and making them available for download. Especially since it's a very polished distro. But the wording on the blog post appears a little arrogant since it is not an entire OS built from scratch.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- malka 11y ago
  RedHat ?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Well, on the B2B side, there are many people working on Odoo, both for the main company and for the dozens (hundreds?) of companies that build stuff on top of the platform. The platform is LGPL licensed, and all the code we build on top of Odoo at the company I work for is (A/L)GPL licensed, as is most of the code built by companies like ours. And we certainly get paid more than minimum wage :) https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/
  - brusch64 11y ago
    Please don't get me started on Odoo. We've tried to use Odoo as the base system for an ERP for a customer from us. We've started with OpenERP (7 ? - the last version). It looked pretty good - there were books available which showed how to customize OpenERP for your workflows. We've started planning the ERP solution for our customers. Then one of our bosses had the idea to update to Odoo, because it was the "current version". I don't think that it is automatically bad if you change the reporting system completely - but I've hardly seen such a half ass job of documenting the new version. The last time I was working on it the only "documentation" was a 3 page presentation from the Odoo days. Half of the plugins we used with OpenERP didn't work any more, and some functionality was in the GUI(updating plugins) but didn't work (in a stable and released version). When searching for answers Stackoverflow didn't really work and the whole vibe in the forums was along the line "I've finally got it working - it was not that hard after I found out how to do it" or "you just have to pay company x a certain amount they will gladly do that for you". I was really lucky that I got transfered to other projects and was able to stop working on this project.
ed0wolf 11y ago
>Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. Huh. That doesn't make sense.
- mmmmmbop 11y ago
  Guess it is meant to say write. I cringed reading that.
embik 11y ago
Hello everyone, I'm a contributor to elementary (did some small coding and sitting around in their Slack). I'm not 100% sure I should post, but I've seen the HN community being very reasonable, so here we go. Please note I'm in no way official for elementary and I wasn't involved with this blog post at all; I just would like to provide another perspective on the topics discussed here. Yes, the blog post is/was terrible worded. That "cheating" thing ... Yeah. It was pretty bad. It's a difficult topic to talk about money in FOSS (for obvious reasons) and the blog post did it really the wrong (still does for me, but that's a very personal opinion). I'm also not really okay with the whole pay-before-download thing, but I'm really not the one entitled to make such decisions. From my point of view, the whole idea was "people should support things they like". I completely understand some do not like Pantheon and think it's a OS X ripoff (I've seen people calling almost everything "osx ripoff", but there are parallels between OS X and elementary, no doubt). Therefore, these don't understand why they should pay for something they do not value. Totally understandable. But there are people who love elementary (even more than OS X, for that matter) and are using it on a daily basis. elementary matters to these people and there are two ways of supporting FOSS projects you are using: Contribute time (code) or money. There are better ways of shifting attention to this, of course. I don't doubt that ... What baffles me nonetheless is how people view "us" (the elementary devs) for single blog posts and a few design desicions (I'm not talking about the website stuff, more about desktop design) people disagree with. Well, I'm totally biased of course, but there really is no vibe of "money grabing" or "entitlement" around the team. Most of us are young guys from all over the world coding on elementary in their spare time. It's a difficult thing to make money with a desktop-focused Linux distro and there is nobody really making money. Nobody's in for the big bucks. It would be lovely to employ some of the devs full-time, but that's simply not possible at the moment. elementary won't be the next big thing people throw money at, and everyone's aware of that fact. Regarding "give money back to Ubuntu / GNU / the kernel", which is a difficult topic as well ... I'm trying to get my words right. Let's say, most of these things are in the lucky situation of corporate interest; Canonical is making their money via Ubuntu (server) support and server services (I frankly doubt they make a lot of money via the desktop), same applies to the kernel. The amounts of money elementary could provide to these projects / companies / whatever would show elementary's good intentions, but it'd a drop in the bucket. Whenever possible, elementary tries to bring patches upstream to benefit everyone. As Pantheon is building heavily on top of the GNOME stack, some devs pushed bug fixes and features to GTK or Mutter. We have some guys from Xfce, GNOME and other FOSS projects around to talk about our stuff if we think they would be useful for others. elementary is a really small project with only a few constant contributors, but everyone is trying to give their best. Hopefully I was able to describe my stance without coming off as entitled. If not, please forgive me.
ifdefdebug 11y ago
2,000,000 * (100 - 99.875) / 100 * (10 + 1) / 2 = 13750 They piss everybody off for literally nothing.
sudioStudio64 11y ago
For all of the people asking about contributions to the OS...its a fact that most people who work on Linux aren't volunteers anymore. Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. The same goes for a lot of the work that is done on distributions...even the free ones. These guys are doing some great work and it would really be a shame if it didn't continue. They are attempting to put together the kind of polished end user experience that Linux has never had. That's a good thing. It would probably be best if they could find another funding source besides end users because the Linux community has a pretty bad track record of supporting these kinds of efforts.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. Not by the Linux Foundation or Linux users. They're paid by third parties. It's like MS pays it's employees to work on Linux but MS is still doing it for free.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ubertaco 11y ago
Before they published this blog post, I was mildly annoyed at having to type "$0" to download Elementary, but otherwise I dug their goal of making a clean and simple-to-use desktop environment. Then they published this post -- and mind you, this is not the original version of this post (the original was worse). With statements like: >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. ...and... >we feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement is worth some money. ...when all they've really done is: * Build a stripped-down Gnome-family derivative Desktop Environment * Build a custom-skinned wrapper around GTK that fits their custom DE (and expect app devs to fall in line with it) * Write a few super-primitive apps in it (a Rhythmbox fork, a notepad clone, and a basic email client) is just a -bit- overstating things, to say nothing of the difference between a desktop environment and "an entire operating system". Then they say: > Most of the open source world is similar; Inkscape and GIMP only get money for development if users decide to give it to them. without the slightest ounce of self-awareness to realize that neither of those projects make conscious design decisions to trick users into thinking they have to buy them. If I see a $____ box, my first assumption is that typing "0" has the same effect as typing "-1" or "aaaa": a validation error. It's a very close sibling of the "Sneak Into Basket"[1] UI "dark pattern". These are the moves that turned me from a fan/advocate of elementary to a critic: not that their software was poor quality (the parts they had actually built were, for the most part, roughly as nice a UI as most other Ubuntu derivatives had in my opinion), but that their philosophy and attitude made them the kind of people I want to actively avoid promoting. [1] http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/ http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/

102 points by LukeB_UK 11y ago

I think there are some interesting dynamics at play here.... The post (even with the edits to remove unfortunate phrasing) seems really aggrieved at the community's expectation that open source projects are by definition free as in beer. Reading the comments on that article, it does seem true that many folks seem to feel entitled to a free copy of this software. This is part of the culture and the ecosystem, though. It doesn't justify being an entitled jerk, but if you're going to operate in a particular space, you have to understand the culture behind that space. (And for those on HN stating "this is why you don't see entrepreneurial activity in the Linux ecosystem"...well, how much entrepreneurial activity are you seeing in the Windows ecosystem these days? I think the Linux attitude may foster rather than hamper long-term innovation, because even when the money moves elsewhere there's still that core group of people working on projects for love and passion rather than for money.)

realusername 11y ago

It would be interesting to see if the new dialog box is improving the number of users paying for the software, but I guess they are waiting for more data to see that. Appart for that, I have absolutely no problem paying for Elementary, in my opinion is the best Linux distribution and by far. Everything is really polished and well done.

Mikeb85 11y ago
> Everything is really polished and well done. I'm using Elementary OS right now. It's pretty, but it's really no more polished than Ubuntu. In fact, it just mostly uses the same Ubuntu repositories. That's not a bad thing, but it's worth keeping in mind that Elementary OS is as good as it is because it's building on Ubuntu.
- neuropie 11y ago
  I wonder how Canonical feel about Elementary making money off an operating system that receives updates from archive.ubuntu.com
  - NhanH 11y ago
    It really doesn't matter how they feel though.
    - neuropie 11y ago
      It all seems a bit similar to Red Star OS.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    Probably the same way the Debian folks feel about Canonical making money from an operating system built on Debian.
  - superuser2 11y ago
    >making money I highly doubt they're turning a profit.

mirimir 11y ago

If they accepted Bitcoins, I would have paid some USD. But mirimir has no credit cards.

markild 11y ago
They do, though...
- mirimir 11y ago
  You're right! I must have missed it.

jasonkester 11y ago

This is completely baffling. Just remove the option to download your thing for free. You know it has value. You just spent a thousand words explaining why you think people should pay money for your thing. There's an easy way to get them to do that: Charge money for your thing. No need to guilt anybody. No need to apologize. You built an entire operating system. Those cost money. Give your users the option of paying you, not using your thing, or (if you absolutely can't detach yourself from this irrational need to give your work away for free) building it from source.

detaro 11y ago
Removing the option to download GPL software for free seems like a pointless exercise... Also: they build a set of desktop apps for Ubuntu and did some other polishing work. Not to say that isn't hard and important work, but it also isn't "building an entire operating system".
- jasonkester 11y ago
  Not at all. The "download" we're talking about here is the binary (unless I'm mistaken). People with $10 in their bank account and the ability to calculate the value of half an hour of their time will happily pay to avoid fighting dependencies to compile this thing from source. The angry entitled people commenting on this poor guy's blog can download the source for free. (And to your edit, people who think that there is not $10 of value added can simply not install it.) Everybody wins.
  - mahouse 11y ago
    As easy as googling "elementary os iso download" and there will probably be some website with all ISOs ready to be downloaded for free.
  - derefr 11y ago
    People tend to use Linux for mass installs, though. Once you say "it costs $10 to download this software", you have to ask "but what if I want to download it again? Or, conversely, download once but install onto 1000 PCs?" The fully-correct-and-flexible answer is, sadly, the Microsoft-like enterprisey one: to have a user account and charge the user for a multi-seat license to the software, which provides a product key entered during the installation. That way, you can reuse the same installation image as much as you want, but each activation has a cost.

markild 11y ago

Interesting read. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first I've heard about elementary. Though, not directly related to their payment model, I wish they would more clearly state that they're a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I couldn't "quickly" find any info on it anywhere on their site, so I had to find out from Wikipedia. I guess this has something to do with their target audience, and the way the sell this as an alternative to Windows or OS X. Somewhat related to their payment model, I would very much like to see them contribute some of what they're making back to Ubuntu/Debian, if they don't already.

njloof 11y ago
It's also unclear from their homepage why I would want yet another OS/UI combo. What are the advantages? Does it run any apps? I'm definitely not paying $10 sight unseen. Maybe a 30-day trial would be a better model before asking for payment.
- narrowrail 11y ago
  Why would they need to offer a trial? Just type in 0$ and download or just download the torrent directly (they default to a torrent anyway, at least when choosing 0$).
  - lukaslalinsky 11y ago
    Because it's not clear that you can actually type in $0 and if you do you are a "cheater". Right know it asks for money, before you even see what it is and what it does.

thewhitetulip 11y ago

This has already been discussed on HN before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995

staz 11y ago
Yes this is a 3 months old blog post, don't know why it's getting frontpaged again
- misframer 11y ago
  It's quite normal for submissions to be reposted and make it to the front page again.
  - thewhitetulip 11y ago
    Yes, it can come on the front page: what worried me the most was that people were commenting on it as if it is for the first time it has arrived on HN! Time travel!

nubela 11y ago

Why don't you include the payment WITHIN the system? I wouldn't pay before I try eOS, it is only if I stick and use it, will I consider paying.

toyg 11y ago
I'd go further and say that opensource distributions should all have a standard customizable package that will "nag" users after a certain amount of hours from first boot. The package could spring a pop-up if X is running, or send an email to root@ (or whatever the "admin" user is). If done well, I bet a lot of users wouldn't mind dropping $5 or $10 -- probably more than you get by doing the occasional donation drive. In fact, some good soul could get together the main actors (Debian, Ubuntu, Arch) and set up a shared infrastructure that will provide a common flow for this revenue stream (payment UI, merchant accounts etc), sharing fixed costs.
- rspeer 11y ago
  ... just like all those people who paid for WinZip and mIRC?
  - toyg 11y ago
    Before Microsoft included decent compression facilities in Windows, a lot of people did in fact pay for WinZip. I bet some still do, considering it's still on sale -- something that cannot be said for most Linux distributions.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I highly doubt many people were paying for WinZip or WinRAR, given that they're a running gag in the IT sector (just like paying for Total Commander). But I'd love to see data on it, if anyone has some.
      - dchest 11y ago
        Revenues of WinZip Computing (WinZip) 2003 - $25,259,000 2004 - $24,928,000 2005 - $22,700,000 (from Corel's IPO filings, http://blog.goodsol.com/2006/04/winzip_and_jasc.html http://blog.goodsol.com/2006/04/winzip_and_jasc.html)

rlpb 11y ago

It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software has a huge cost", but there's no mention of the money they're collecting going to the developers of Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams that surely together comprise the majority of the work that they're referring to. Basing their wording on the huge development cost of the entire work, rather than what they're adding, seems misleading to me since what they're adding is a tiny proportion of the entire cost they're referring to; yet they seem to want to take the money as justified by the entire cost. That's not to say that Elementary OS developers aren't adding value. Clearly they are if users are downloading from them, and it's fine to ask users to pay for that.

colechristensen 11y ago
Consider also, quite importantly, that a large volume of the work done on any Linux-based operating system is and has been done entirely without money changing hands.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Only when one forgets that most of those developers: - were payed to work on GNU/Linux by their employers - had a different source of income - were students with their parents paying for their bills - were building a portfolio for a job change So money did change hands, even if indirectly.
  - zxcvcxz 11y ago
    You're being pedantic. The users point is that neither the Linux foundation, Linux Users, or Linus Torvalds pays people to contribute to the kernel. While one company may pay its employees to write code for the Linux kernel, that company is still writing the code and contributing it to Linux for free.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      The employees salary is not free, or are you suggesting those employees don't enter the hours into the companies accounting system?

orik 11y ago

Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. I'd like point out a couple of quotes. https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.elementaryos.org/post/110645528530/payments https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.eleme... >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. Elementary's self-important attitude has and continues to completely baffle me. People joke about ElementaryOS being just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell, because it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell. Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools, and yet they made the argument that the end user is 'cheating the system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for free. If Elementary wanted to take the high ground, they'd introduce a Humble Bundle style payment system split between the various foundations they're building off of. Maybe the defaults would look something like 30% to the Linux Foundation, 20% to the FSF, 20% to Debian, 20% to Ubuntu, and 10% to themselves.

ikurei 11y ago
I don't disagree with what you said, but I'd like to comment on a few points. >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. (Auch, reading that hurt; still...) There they didn't say users are cheating for not paying them, but for not paying in general. Also consider that The Linux Foundation, the FSF, Canonical... all have way bigger communities and visibiliy, and relations with big companies and other ways of obtaining economical support. Elementary depends only on their reduced user base. > it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell. Well, yes. But they still put a lot of work into it. It rest on the shoulders of the GTK and Gnome giants, but they have still put a lot of work. Describing them that way isn't, imho, fair at all. Apart from the Pantheon's surface, they've been working on libraries as Contracts and Granite GTK. I've no idea if they're complicated behemoths or ridiculously thin work-of-an-afternoon additions to GNU/Linux. I think I would be fine with it if they had just mentioned "hey, our hard work depends on the hard work of this fellas, consider donating to them too!". Specially if really they are not making any profit as of yet, I don't think it's that bad to ask for the funding to continue your work from the people who enjoy it. PD: I'm writing this from Elementary, which I use on two computers. In this one I ended up going back to Awesome WM, but I keep Pantheon on the other. I really like it, even if it isn't an incredible distance away from Xubuntu. Although I'm not particularly wealthy, I'll consider donating a few bucks to Elementary. It is not the first OSS project I donate to, but I'll also consider donating to it's upstream. PD2: I was partly playing devil's advocate. Even as an Elementary user, I didn't particularly like this post.

joosters 11y ago

But it's entirely the wrong time to try and charge customers. How can I decide how much to pay for it before I've even downloaded the thing? (Also, the shading on the payment buttons is so minor that it is very difficult to see which one is selected on my iPad screen)

SunShiranui 11y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't we pay for most products before actually being able to use them?
- diggan 11y ago
  A normal, physical product, yeah sure. But most SaaS, Baas or any other software project usually have a demo/trial for you to use before deciding if it's worth paying for.

b3lvedere 11y ago

Hey, it's your OS. Do whatever you want with it as long as you respect the GPL. You do not need to explain that. I've tried Elementary a bit. Didn't like it. Sorry.

jitix 11y ago

It's not bad that they are asking for money. Although the current norm is to give away the binaries for free, I think they can and should charge for the service they are providing by building the binaries and making them available for download. Especially since it's a very polished distro. But the wording on the blog post appears a little arrogant since it is not an entire OS built from scratch.

deleted 11y ago

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malka 11y ago
RedHat ?
icebraining 11y ago
Well, on the B2B side, there are many people working on Odoo, both for the main company and for the dozens (hundreds?) of companies that build stuff on top of the platform. The platform is LGPL licensed, and all the code we build on top of Odoo at the company I work for is (A/L)GPL licensed, as is most of the code built by companies like ours. And we certainly get paid more than minimum wage :) https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/
- brusch64 11y ago
  Please don't get me started on Odoo. We've tried to use Odoo as the base system for an ERP for a customer from us. We've started with OpenERP (7 ? - the last version). It looked pretty good - there were books available which showed how to customize OpenERP for your workflows. We've started planning the ERP solution for our customers. Then one of our bosses had the idea to update to Odoo, because it was the "current version". I don't think that it is automatically bad if you change the reporting system completely - but I've hardly seen such a half ass job of documenting the new version. The last time I was working on it the only "documentation" was a 3 page presentation from the Odoo days. Half of the plugins we used with OpenERP didn't work any more, and some functionality was in the GUI(updating plugins) but didn't work (in a stable and released version). When searching for answers Stackoverflow didn't really work and the whole vibe in the forums was along the line "I've finally got it working - it was not that hard after I found out how to do it" or "you just have to pay company x a certain amount they will gladly do that for you". I was really lucky that I got transfered to other projects and was able to stop working on this project.

ed0wolf 11y ago

>Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. Huh. That doesn't make sense.

mmmmmbop 11y ago
Guess it is meant to say write. I cringed reading that.

embik 11y ago

Hello everyone, I'm a contributor to elementary (did some small coding and sitting around in their Slack). I'm not 100% sure I should post, but I've seen the HN community being very reasonable, so here we go. Please note I'm in no way official for elementary and I wasn't involved with this blog post at all; I just would like to provide another perspective on the topics discussed here. Yes, the blog post is/was terrible worded. That "cheating" thing ... Yeah. It was pretty bad. It's a difficult topic to talk about money in FOSS (for obvious reasons) and the blog post did it really the wrong (still does for me, but that's a very personal opinion). I'm also not really okay with the whole pay-before-download thing, but I'm really not the one entitled to make such decisions. From my point of view, the whole idea was "people should support things they like". I completely understand some do not like Pantheon and think it's a OS X ripoff (I've seen people calling almost everything "osx ripoff", but there are parallels between OS X and elementary, no doubt). Therefore, these don't understand why they should pay for something they do not value. Totally understandable. But there are people who love elementary (even more than OS X, for that matter) and are using it on a daily basis. elementary matters to these people and there are two ways of supporting FOSS projects you are using: Contribute time (code) or money. There are better ways of shifting attention to this, of course. I don't doubt that ... What baffles me nonetheless is how people view "us" (the elementary devs) for single blog posts and a few design desicions (I'm not talking about the website stuff, more about desktop design) people disagree with. Well, I'm totally biased of course, but there really is no vibe of "money grabing" or "entitlement" around the team. Most of us are young guys from all over the world coding on elementary in their spare time. It's a difficult thing to make money with a desktop-focused Linux distro and there is nobody really making money. Nobody's in for the big bucks. It would be lovely to employ some of the devs full-time, but that's simply not possible at the moment. elementary won't be the next big thing people throw money at, and everyone's aware of that fact. Regarding "give money back to Ubuntu / GNU / the kernel", which is a difficult topic as well ... I'm trying to get my words right. Let's say, most of these things are in the lucky situation of corporate interest; Canonical is making their money via Ubuntu (server) support and server services (I frankly doubt they make a lot of money via the desktop), same applies to the kernel. The amounts of money elementary could provide to these projects / companies / whatever would show elementary's good intentions, but it'd a drop in the bucket. Whenever possible, elementary tries to bring patches upstream to benefit everyone. As Pantheon is building heavily on top of the GNOME stack, some devs pushed bug fixes and features to GTK or Mutter. We have some guys from Xfce, GNOME and other FOSS projects around to talk about our stuff if we think they would be useful for others. elementary is a really small project with only a few constant contributors, but everyone is trying to give their best. Hopefully I was able to describe my stance without coming off as entitled. If not, please forgive me.

ifdefdebug 11y ago

2,000,000 * (100 - 99.875) / 100 * (10 + 1) / 2 = 13750 They piss everybody off for literally nothing.

sudioStudio64 11y ago

For all of the people asking about contributions to the OS...its a fact that most people who work on Linux aren't volunteers anymore. Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. The same goes for a lot of the work that is done on distributions...even the free ones. These guys are doing some great work and it would really be a shame if it didn't continue. They are attempting to put together the kind of polished end user experience that Linux has never had. That's a good thing. It would probably be best if they could find another funding source besides end users because the Linux community has a pretty bad track record of supporting these kinds of efforts.

zxcvcxz 11y ago
>Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. Not by the Linux Foundation or Linux users. They're paid by third parties. It's like MS pays it's employees to work on Linux but MS is still doing it for free.
deleted 11y ago
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ubertaco 11y ago

Before they published this blog post, I was mildly annoyed at having to type "$0" to download Elementary, but otherwise I dug their goal of making a clean and simple-to-use desktop environment. Then they published this post -- and mind you, this is not the original version of this post (the original was worse). With statements like: >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. ...and... >we feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development and refinement is worth some money. ...when all they've really done is: * Build a stripped-down Gnome-family derivative Desktop Environment * Build a custom-skinned wrapper around GTK that fits their custom DE (and expect app devs to fall in line with it) * Write a few super-primitive apps in it (a Rhythmbox fork, a notepad clone, and a basic email client) is just a -bit- overstating things, to say nothing of the difference between a desktop environment and "an entire operating system". Then they say: > Most of the open source world is similar; Inkscape and GIMP only get money for development if users decide to give it to them. without the slightest ounce of self-awareness to realize that neither of those projects make conscious design decisions to trick users into thinking they have to buy them. If I see a $____ box, my first assumption is that typing "0" has the same effect as typing "-1" or "aaaa": a validation error. It's a very close sibling of the "Sneak Into Basket"[1] UI "dark pattern". These are the moves that turned me from a fan/advocate of elementary to a critic: not that their software was poor quality (the parts they had actually built were, for the most part, roughly as nice a UI as most other Ubuntu derivatives had in my opinion), but that their philosophy and attitude made them the kind of people I want to actively avoid promoting. [1] http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/ http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/