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Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want

Posted by Soulskill on from the pay-what-you-want-to-continue-breathing dept.

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."

5 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Amazon ads by Knuckles · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    --
    "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
  2. I donated... by osmosys · · Score: 4, Informative

    twenty bucks to Mint! :-D

  3. Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount? by gfxguy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Stupid sexy Flanders.
  5. Re:Pay for Ubuntu? by LurkerXXX · · Score: 5, Informative

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