Slashdot Mirror
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."
This doesn't get you out of the Amazon partnership, does it?
Just a thought... I still wish Cannonical would have put its resources towards helping make Gnome Shell better as opposed to taking its ball and going home.
I wonder how much of this cash will go to the real heroes i.e. upstream people like Debian? Canonical is just a reseller/ISV as they call them in the market.
I use it daily for my work and the kid's machine runs it. I'll drop them some $$$ next time.
In a band? Use WheresTheGig for free.
I just hope they don't get discouraged at the number of downloads and installations that don't receive donations. I suspect that a lot of people are like me--they don't mind throwing a few bucks their way (or even a few dozen), but we tend to install, reinstall, set up virtual machines, install yet again, and so on across dozens of machines. I might give a one-off donation, but I'm not going to donate every time I install a copy of Ubuntu.
That's one of the things that's so damn frustrating about Windows and why Ubuntu (or really, any Linux distribution) is so useful. Windows is an awesome OS and I don't mind paying the license fee to run it, but I don't have a few thousand dollars to install it on each of my hobbyist VMs I use for development and testing stuff. Back in the days when I could just use my product code to install it willy-nilly on a few dozen machines, each of which I probably run for a few days and then reinstall for some new reason, it's not that big a deal. But now that everything phones home and nags the hell out of you and denies you service to what you bought, it's not such an appealing option. Hopefully Microsoft will someday realize that they're actively driving people like me away from Windows, but until then, I'll happily cast my lot with Ubuntu instead.
I would have paid... right up until Unity, when they turned the desktop to utter shite, and I stopped using Ubuntu.
If they want me to use that fucking abortion, they'll have to pay me.
Ubuntu users unite to have Unity removed from Ubuntu because of bad usability.
Amazon ads, Window decorations on the wrong side that the users voted agains (but "it's not a democracy, we don't vote on design decisions"), "Unity"... seems to me you want to annoy the users back to microsoft... I'd pay for a distribution that LISTENS, not for one like Shuttlebuntu, who seems more concerned to establish himself as "same asshole as in cuppertino, different continent"...
twenty bucks to Mint! :-D
A company with employees has to make money at some point. I don't blame them for looking for ways to monetise Ubuntu. They should do that because it's better to have stronger alternatives to Windows and as much as some people hate it, you can't make the best product for no money at all.
Perhaps Ubuntu is doomed to fail for targeting the desktop more than the server. But someone has to do it. They have made some mistake recently but it's nice someone is trying to do something different rather than just making Linux into Windows.
I'm on Ubuntu now and there is a good chance I'll move to Mint or Debian next but they have given a lot of years of good use so I will probably throw some money their way.
As long as they keep the unity interface they'd have to pay me to use it...and I'm still not sure it would be worth it.
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
I like Ubuntu but I've become disenchanted with Unity so I'm going to give Linux Mint with Ginger a shot when it comes out in November. I hear it uses the Ubuntu repositories anyway. I just need to compile a list of questions I need answered by seasoned users before I make the switch.
Although Mint is ubu-based, they seem to listen to their users, seemingly unlike post-LucidLynx Ubuntu. To me, Mint is what Ubuntu was before it went Authoritarian Bubble Rubbish -- a pretty fantastic, if not amazing distro. Back in Lucid, I'd not have thought twice about clicking the donation link. However, to pay what I think "it's worth" would probably be unreasonable, since a functional, stable distro is nearly invaluable to me. One could easily think that putting a billionaire behind Linux would be a wonderful thing, but I am not so sure. I also wonder if bubble-people are the sorts that would donate; they might find the process too complex and give up. Maybe Ubu should have an app glued by myriad dependencies that activates upon network-connection and solicits the user with a guided bubble-journey to their bank* account. Maybe they could deprecate Bash for a squeak interface, where users can squeak audible commands to execute various applications; "If you'd like to make a donation, please emit a higher, rather than lower-pitched squeak now.", etc.
Yes, I am slightly bitter; because I remember Ubuntu as something almost inconceivably excellent. The idea of having the freedom of Linux along with out-of-the-box functionality seems almost too good to be true. Thankfully there's Mint for that.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Let's say I want to donate to the best organization for Linux today, which if I don't see the desktop as the priority surely wouldn't be Canonical. Who would that be then?
//TODO: signature
The iso should only have on it what is needed to get a network install going. In fact, all the live distros should cooperate and create a single bootstrap iso that presents you with a menu of what distro and what version you want to network install.
If you mean, "In addition to the standard all-in-one ISO," I wholeheartedly agree.
If you mean, "Instead of the standard all-in-one ISO," you're an idiot - not every computer in the universe has a network connection, and some of them, for damn good reason.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'd recently decided to switch my laptop to Mint.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I've attempted to install Ubuntu 12.04 on my Mac Pro, both straight onto a hard drive and through a VirtualBox virtual machine, and it fails both installations. So I'd be willing to pay for it when it freaking works.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
noobs and lamers, sure. But also businesses, non-profits, and other organizations looking for a low cost solution to their computing needs - including the maintenance side of the equation.
Go back a year or two, and anyone who wanted a low maintenance system was considering Ubuntu, if not outright installing/using it. Now-a-days though, that "low maintenance" target is slowly disappearing. KDE/Gnome do wonders for the low maintenance thing (maybe not Gnome so much these days), but the underlying system is starting to need more effort than I'd care to spend. My day job is to write code - not maintain systems. So the less time I can spend doing system maintenance, or learning yet another distro in the hopes of finding the low maintenance nirvana, the more time I have to actually be making money for the work I get paid for (i.e. writing code). In that context Ubuntu is still a valid option. But only considering that I immediately ditch unity and install Kubuntu desktop environment (mixed luck installing Kubuntu directly over the years) and have semi-scripted setting up my dev environment. But with the push for cash - amazon and now the "show us some love/cash" efforts, I'm fairly certain that I'm looking at Red Hat/Fedora for my next install. Or maybe Debian, though it seems to need more effort to set up right...)
Dependency hell? You sure you aren't thinking of Redhat/Fedora? I've never had any dependency issues with Ubuntu that I didn't have with Debian, which is to say, I've never run into any... still... if you aren't into the GUI and you don't want to use their daemons or additional features, I can't see why you would pick them over Debian anyway. Oh, that's right. Paid developers which allows for packages to make it into the stable builds sooner so you don't wait 3 years for the version of Apache from 3 years ago to be added to your latest release. I forgot about that.
goes to Debian, where 90% of the work comes from.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
At least for LAMP stacks and other packages, that doesn't matter if you use the dotdeb repos.
That's what this is all about.
I'd be more than happy to contribute to a united fund that pools tax-deductible donations to OSS projects, like United Way does for its charitable causes. The key here is to make the donations recurring and automatic. It used to be that payroll deductions were the only way to achieve that, but now there may be more options. I don't want to give to just one organization, I'd like to spread the love around. And, I only want to be asked once a year, not every time I download something.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Mod the parent up.
Been using Kubuntu on the desktop, and in all servers I managed, be they in house or for clients, since 2006. Never had a dependency problem, nor a daemon problem.
Sent from a Kubuntu 12.04 laptop ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
You remind me of the Comic Book Guy:
Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: For what? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.
The summary complains that:
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.
but their solution isn't to try to get manufacturers to offer OS choice on machines, instead it's to ask users to pay twice to use only one operating system.
How about a method to get some of the major manufacturers to allow you to direct your Microsoft tax to Ubuntu instead when you don't plan to ever run Windows...
Maybe it was breezy in 2005 even ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
If you want something supported for a long time, I would say Centos or Debian are the way to go. And if you wish to sustain developpers, you can either donate to Debian with SPI, or pay for a RHEL subscription, and that benefit to Centos, Scientific Linux, or even OEL, who are all clones of RHEL, and pay for jobs of many upstream developers ( http://www.redhat.com/promo/os-community/projects.html ).
Believe or not, Mark Shuttle worth does not have a car. He bikes to work. When in London he usually either bikes, takes the tube or, in case of something urgent, a taxi.
Scientia est Potentia
Unity is still a buggy PITA. That was stuffed down my throat. IF they want loyalty, they have to ask.
Until i can install Ubuntu on my RAID array without dealing with manual grub entries, its not ready to be paid for IMO.
I thought Ubuntu was wonderful under KDE and Gnome both. Would have been pleased to donate, never saw a web page that asked me to do so. Then they shoved Unity down my throat, far before it was ready, and I didn't upgrade for 2 releases. 10.10, I believe, finally broke via upgrades that didn't work (3rd team must have been assigned to that), and I finally had to use Unity on 12.04. I couldn't make the old gnome work for some reason. PITA. I wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of loyalty in that mess. Now they ask for donations. There is something very wrong in their thinking. So I will make a donation for past services, but I am looking for a new distribution.
I think that was between 2006-2010. That was my go to distribution for beginners and myself on older machines.
If I want to donate to Debian, I can donate directly to Debian. If I choose to donate to Canonical instead of Debian, I sure as hell hope my donation goes to Canonical instead of Debian.
THIS!! I love Ubuntu, have been using it since 7.04, but I'm in the "Detest Unity" group here.. I recently upgraded my laptop and desktop from 10.04 to 12.04 and figured I'd give Unity an honest try vs listening to all the pissing/moaning about what a piece of shite it is... After a week of nearly tearing my already thinning hair out, I decided to get with the program and installed Cinnamon. Except for a couple of red "kaboom" icons right after installing, I feel like I'm back on 10.04 with Gnone2.. As far as I'm concerned I agree 100% with the crowd who says Unity is shite...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
No need to, you can turn it off anyway, in Privacy settings.
Users should have to turn that sort of half-baked, privacy-leaking shit on, not off.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
If users could donate to Mozilla and direct funding to particular components of Firefox and Thunderbird, perhaps we'd see some of the five-year-old+ bugs get fixed and Thunderbird would get an Exchange Web Services connector for mail/contacts/notes.
Nah, he just wants to visit the ISS again.
you mean like Xubuntu, kubuntu, lubuntu, soon to be gnombuntu, and (whatever the enlightenment desktop variant is called).
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
ubuntu server is worthless?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
They don't contribute to GNOME. They don't contribute to the kernel. They didn't create any of the apps they ship with, like libre office, firefox, rhythmbox. They don't give shit to the FSF. Why should I donate to them? So they can use the money campaigning towards getting more binary drivers and proprietary apps on their store?
Advertisers and venture capitalists pollute people's motivations and in the worst cases lead to user experience being compromised to satisfy other agendas. Kickstarter projects, app.net and Sublime Text (just from my personal experience) seem like excellent steps in the right direction: marketing directly to end users without all the nonsense and corporate financial trickery wedged in between. There are cases where this can't work, of course. I think Wikipedia and Google should be essential public services but in the absence of an effective world government (or indeed particularly effective national ones) it doesn't seem like there's anyone who can take responsibility for them.
I think it would be nice if Canonical gave some proportion of the proceeds to a charity that helps conserve the animal of the current release. It's a shame though that if they did so it would come too late to help bankroll "Efforts for the Saverization of the Pangolin".
He should get a car. Taxis in London are very expensive - moreso than parking.
He should get a car. Taxis in London are very expensive - moreso than parking.
Have you ever seen London?
You're basically missing two fundemental problems with driving which is (a) getting there through the vast quantity of traffic and (b) finding one of those parking spaces once you're where you want to be.
Neither of the London Mayors even drove in London. Both prefered to take the tube, walk (Ken), bike (Boris) train or bus.
Even cabinet ministers often go by bike (and then accuse policemen of being plebs if they don't open the vehicle gate for them).
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Bodhi would be the (unofficial) Enlightenment variant - I use it myself and in terms of looks and memory/CPU usage beats all the major DEs handily.
http://www.bodhilinux.com/
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
How so? We have a pretty large mysql install still that has gone from 8.04 to 10.04 an now is 12.04 without any issues.
...and I'll be skipping that step. I've been looking for a good reason to switch for a while--I just don't want to stay up all night reconfiguring my work machine.
I live and work in London so yes. I drive in as well and park in E1 (Citroen C3 which is congestion charge exempt). It's not hard or stressful if you know what you are doing
i already gave up on it because i couldnt get around unity after trying for a year. Mint works way better for me now.
is this the beginning of the end for ubuntu ? adnags and opt-out please give money forms ?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Umm, if you don't want to spend time maintaining your system, Fedora would hardly be choice #1. After all, it's not a polished release, it's explicitly just a testing vehicle for RHEL.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I wouldn't call debian "supported for a long time". They only provide 1 year of overlap.
IIRC recently ubuntu extended their LTS policy to 5 years for the desktop (which with their standard release cycle gives three years of overlap) as well as the server. Though you do have to watch out if you plan to keep a ubuntu system for a long time without upgrading. In particular if you use anything from universe/multiverse then you will have to manage security updates for it yourself or live without security updates for it.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Taxi's in the UK have the special privilage of being able to use bus lanes. So if you want to get arround quickly in a major city center it's hard to beat them (helicopters move quicker but finding a place to land them may be complicated).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register