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

Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[macromorgan]

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.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Desler]

Yeah because the GNOME people are well-known for collaborating with others and being open to criticism. Oh wait... Why should anyone want to work with a project whose team is filled with a bunch of pigheaded people to whom NIH syndrome is a way of life?

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[X0563511]

I'd rather they took BOTH out back and shot them.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Grishnakh]

This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.

If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[maxwell demon]

That argument would have made sense if Ubuntu had switched to another standard system, like KDE, Xfce, or whatever. But they went on making their own. If there's one company who cannot complain to others about NIH syndrome, it's Canonical.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[binarylarry]

I'd say the most immediate change was the performance. Unity just performed horrifically for me before and I use fairly high end hardware (Intel i7 series processors, Nvidia GPUs, etc). That was a huge turn off.

I also found that the older Unity had all kinds of odd usability oddities and problems (sometimes various window management features didn't work, parts of unity would crash and I'd have to logout or reboot, etc).

So it was essentially a shuddering clusterfuck that actually impeded my work.

So far the new version is fast, just works and most importantly stays out of my way. Most of the time I don't see much OS UI, just my apps (which is how things should be IMO).

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?

[maxdread]

As a counter point, if they found that Gnome was suddenly going in a direction that didn't serve their or their users needs and the Gnome team refused to work with them it makes sense to switch correct?

Now, the same problem they ran into with the Gnome team can easily happen with the above projects, they have little say in how they evolve and in which direction they go and it simply leaves them open to being screwed with again the future. It makes a lot of sense to simply run with your own project.

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:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[gfxguy]

My work environment has at least three applications open (also on a 30" monitor); they do not even overlap, but fit perfectly together and fill the screen (I am anal retentive that way). Unity simply wouldn't work.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Grishnakh]

Kubuntu is pretty well-known as being not well maintained due to lack of developers; basically, someone just slapped the vanilla KDE packages on top of Ubuntu and called it "done". It works, but it's not an official release at all (it is not maintained at all by Canonical, only a volunteer), and could really be a lot better.

If you want Ubuntu under the hood with KDE, Linux Mint KDE Edition is a better choice.

I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[pointyhat]

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.

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.

I'm OK with this

[helixcode123]

I use it daily for my work and the kid's machine runs it. I'll drop them some $$$ next time.

Re:Amazon ads

[Knuckles]

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

I just hope they don't get discouraged

[KingSkippus]

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.

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:Amazon ads

[pointyhat]

I think you got it wrong: "you should be able to turn it on in the privacy settings". Oh no wait, that's not how it works these days - privacy is opt in!

Re:Amazon ads

[MozeeToby]

Personal information is the currency used to buy a lot of products these days. I've never paid Google a dime, but I've gotten many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of value out of their products and services; in exchange I give them an amount of personal data that they use to present me with ads.

This just in

[SuperMooCow]

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

Re:This just in

[Desler]

Because Unity is the epitome of cargo cult programming. This is an old comment by Matthew Paul Thomas but it summarizes quite well the usability problems with Unity caused by the cargo cult:

In the April usability test, eight of ten people discovered
the hidden menus. But seven of them discovered the menus by
hovering over the maximized window controls, which in 11.04 were visible all the
time. In 11.10, even those window controls will be hidden by default. So I look forward to seeing whether in 11.10, the fraction of people who learn how to access menus is even smaller, or even slower, or both.

But I don’t think that’s even the primary issue. You write as if learnability (or more specifically, discoverability)
and aesthetics are the only two aspects of usability. They are
important, but so is efficiency.

In the same usability test, whenever one of those seven people needed to use the menus a second time, they didn’t aim directly for the relevant menu. They again moused over the window controls to reveal the menus, and then scooted along to the right. This was, of course, grossly inefficient — especially compared with the speed that a top-of-screen menu bar exists to provide in the first place. In 11.10 the window controls will be hidden too, but the basic efficiency problem will remain: at the moment you’re aiming for the target, you can’t see it.

Every so often, some Ubuntu contributor asks why most of the Unity designers use Mac OS X. The reason, of course, is that those designers are experienced with Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, and other applications that don’t work (or if they do work in Wine, work much less pleasantly) on Ubuntu. And it is precisely those kinds of applications, with their deep feature sets, that use menus most heavily. Anyone who points to Web browsers or mobile OSes as harbingers of a menu-less world is, I think, misguided about what kinds of things people will still use non-mobile OSes for in ten years. It is a small irony that hiding menus by default makes it even less likely that anything like those applications will ever work well on Ubuntu.

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.

Re:This just in

[lennier]

What's actually wrong with Unity? Is there something you can point to, instead of just "ZOMG it's new I don't like it?"

Ok, here goes. A (possibly the) major problem with Unity - and the entire "app-centric" GUI ecosystem from the iDevice and tablet world which it and Windows 8 are aping - is that its focus on applications comes at the expense of documents. This reverses the trend from the 1980s onwards where GUIs were becoming increasingly about the user manipulating rich documents, and puts us right back in the old world of "your data is hard-coded into applications". But that simply isn't the case. Documents transcend applications; the application is just a means to an end.

Why? Two reasons. One, because applications churn faster than data does. For example: my music is a collection of .MP3 and .OGG files. It's over a decade old, and it's not going anywhere. My music player application, however, could be any of Rhythmbox, Banshee, Songbird, VLC. My photograph collection is a bunch of .JPG files. It's also not going to change. The default "photo manager" application (which I'm not sure there's even a need for) in Ubuntu, however, has switched from F-Spot to Shotwell, and then there's the GNOME Viewer if I just want to view them.

Second, there are multiple actions you might want to take with documents, and those different actions may require different applications. If I have a JPG, I *might* want to view it, or I might want to edit it. In that case I'm going to want to open it in GIMP, not Shotwell or Viewer. There's no way the OS can know in advance how I want to work with my data, so it shouldn't attempt to presume that it knows best.

The primary way this broken "applications first" mindset manifests in Unity is with the dock, and the way it groups windows by application rather than document. For instance, if I have two PDF files open, they're two completely separate documents; I want them to appear as two different icons. But no. Dock shows them as one instance of the PDF Viewer, and only once I click on them does it ask me which one I want. That's not at all what the user requires; it's an objective regression in usability (from the document-centric perspective) from even Windows 95's interface. But it's not a bug, it's a design decision, and it's come from inhaling uncritically the iDevice approach of "the app is everything".

I hope this app-focus is just a passing fad in the industry, because it reverses more than thirty years of user interface progress. It's been good news to app developers, as it assures them a privileged industry position and a revenue stream. But it's not good news to the user who wants the ability to sculpt their own document-centric workflow.

Re:Amazon ads

[pointyhat]

The argument is definitely not moot. Opt-in vs Opt-out are completely different as there are opportunities for the opt in situation to occur before you get a chance to opt-out. Asking the user up front is the best approach (even Microsoft do this with Windows 8).

I donated...

[osmosys]

twenty bucks to Mint! :-D

Re:I donated...

[i.r.id10t]

And I donate bandwidth to them all - debian, mint, ubuntu, slackware ... any time I see a new version release notice (usually here on /.) I ssh to my hosted server, start up screen, and start torrenting. Depending on when in the month it is (I get 200gb/mo xfer) and what I've used (typically nothing), I'll seed for 25-50gb upload or until upload from my box is close to nothing.

I can't code well enough to donate that, I don't have any extra $ to donate, so this is how I contribute (and how just about anyone can).

Mint Yes -- Ubuntu No

[Penurious Penguin]

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.

What an odd coincedence

[GameboyRMH]

I'd recently decided to switch my laptop to Mint.

I hope 90% of the money...

[stox]

goes to Debian, where 90% of the work comes from.

Re:I hope 90% of the money...

[wisnoskij]

The people who do the most work, should get the most money?
Sounds like communist propaganda to me.

Re:Entry for "Canonical owes me $[xxxx]" ?

[afgam28]

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.

Re:Mr. Shuttleworth's car needs a new set of wheel

[agoliveira]

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.

Re:Pay for Ubuntu?

[LurkerXXX]

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