Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want

New submitter major_lima sends this excerpt from Ars: "When a typical user downloads Ubuntu for free and installs it on a computer with a Windows license that the user did pay for, Canonical gets nothing in the form of payment. There's nothing wrong with that — this is the open source world, after all, and many people contribute to Ubuntu with code rather than money. But starting this week, Canonical is presenting desktop OS downloaders with an optional donation form. ... 'Pay what you think it's worth,' and 'Show Ubuntu some love' are among the messages users will see, and downloaders can direct their donations to specific parts of Ubuntu development. ... Once you donate, the Ubuntu desktop starts downloading. Or, you can just skip the donation and download the OS for free, just as you always could. For some reason, the donation page is not presented to Ubuntu Server users."

Comments

Re:Amazon ads

[Knuckles]

No need to, you can turn it off anyway, in Privacy settings.

This just in

[SuperMooCow]

Ubuntu users unite to have Unity removed from Ubuntu because of bad usability.

Re:This just in

[Gordonjcp]

So, use it. Oh wait, you can't because Gnome 2 has been dropped. Maybe you could try maintaining that?

There are Gnome 2-like desktop environments available in Ubuntu if you want them - just like when Windows 95 came out, if the new "Start" menu thing was too confusing and new, you could fall back to PROGMAN.EXE and have it work just like Windows 3. Some people even did that, too.

I donated...

[osmosys]

twenty bucks to Mint! :-D

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[thetoadwarrior]

I assume most of it goes to someone else, seeing how the bottom option is basically a "give it to Canonical" option. But with their defaults, they appear to want you to give a little to everyone.

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want, you can always donate $$$ directly to Debian and some associated free software like PostgreSQL or FFmpeg. These donations are not used to pay for developer time. They are generally used to reimburse some of the travel costs associated with things like Debconf for the poorer developers, hardware costs for developer machines (something more recent) etc.

http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/

Debian is just one of the members of SPI. There are other software that benefits too,

http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/

And if you are suspicious that SPI is not associated with Debian, just look at Debian's donations page and be happy.

http://www.debian.org/donations

Cheers!
Anonymous Debian Dev.

PS. $$$ is not a big problem for Debian (as everything is either sponsored or volunteered), but it is always welcome.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

For $700, which only lasts 12 months, and then you have to throw down another $500 every year to keep it up? That's still an absolute shit solution compared to what we could do with Windows XP (and earlier), and can do even easier with the likes of Linux distros such as Ubuntu.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you embark on anything, consider this:

It sounds like you need the Microsoft Partner Action Pack. Just sign up as a basic partner (no entry requirements) then buy the Action Pack here: https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/uk/Pages/Membership/action-pack-subscriptions.aspx - you know you want to. It makes sense. You even get lots of free training and discounts to sweeten the deal and get embedded further into the ecosystem.

The moment you start promoting this stuff, people want you to use your new skills to help them. A few years down the line, you've nailed it job-wise thanks to your new skill set and have a deployed SQL 2008 instance for your favourite client which has cost them £32000GBP in licenses per machine (not terrible). They are super-happy as it's saved them a fuck load on Oracle and it requires only one DBA. Then the CIO comes to you and asks about SQL 2012 upgrades so they can use the new failover/replication stuff. You do the research, then realise they fuck you over by changing it from physical CPUs licenses to cores, resulting in your cash efficient 12-core Xeons turning into another order of magnitude of cost: £386,000 per server! You phone your partner rep up they say "use Azure" which is fuck all use if your data volume is in the TiB space, so it's bend over and take it or spend a year rewriting it all (you know because you wrote most of the app in T-SQL because it was promoted as the "best way of doing things").

This is a cautionary tale as we are as above. Not only that the license audit legal hounds are upon us and are making sure they bleed us dry or at least drag us through the courts to make a few notes even though we're compliant. Guilty until proven innocent.

Seriously, just use Debian/Ubuntu (and PostgreSQL) and avoid this shit completely.

Posted anonymously as we'll probably get sued. Stallman was ALWAYS fucking right. Listen to the guy.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[gfxguy]

Thanks. It still doesn't seem usable (from my perspective). It wasn't bugs, it was design... I like seeing several apps at once, and I have a large screen to accomodate it... Unitiy just doesn't seem designed for large screens.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, isn't this is why Linux Mint is forking Gnome into their own desktop interface? Isn't it called Cinnamon?

Re:Pay for Ubuntu?

[LurkerXXX]

Amen. I'll give to Mint instead. At least they listen to feedback from users.