Slashdot Mirror
Elementary OS: Why We Make You Type "$0"
jones_supa writes Open source software can always be acquired without charge, but can still incur significant development costs. Elementary OS wants to make people aware of this, and have changed their website to suggest donating when downloading, and make users explicitly enter "$0" if they want a free download. This is the same strategy Canonical has used when offering Ubuntu. The Elementary OS blog explains: "Developing software has a huge cost. Some companies offset that cost by charging hundreds of dollars for their software, making manufacturers pay them to license the software, or selling expensive hardware with the OS included. Others offset it by mining user data and charging companies to target ads to their users. [...] If we want to see the world of open source software grow, we should encourage users to pay for its development; otherwise it'll be underfunded or developers will have to resort to backdoor deals and advertising. And nobody wants that future." Currently the only people who have received money for working on Elementary OS have been community members through their bounty program.
these guys think they should type $0 everytime they checkout source code from the upstream projects where the vast majority of the work actually occurs?
$0
We 'make' you type 0$, then we write a lengthy blog post about why you're evil and cheating the system for not paying us for our ubuntu clone we slapped a osx knock-off UI on.
They really aren't 'developing' anything, sure putting together a nice interface takes work but they really aren't doing anything a determined user couldn't do themselves. Besides that, do they even send patches up stream? Do they fix security issues or send patches upstream? Or do they just feed off ubuntu and debian?
This is an absolutely disgusting stance and I can't wait to see this distro fade into obscurity.
... developers will have to resort to backdoor deals and advertising.
Who says they won't take donations and still make backdoor deals - even if donations cover all the development expenses and then some?
aka "ubuntu theme"
...create software, offer it for free, and then whine no one is paying you.
I see.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What if the binaries were sold, but source code was free?
Elementary OS' contribution to their own distribution is probably less than 1%. Almost all the effort into writing and packaging the software has been carried out by others. They are standing on the shoulders of giants. Why the fuck should they demand money for other people's work? It is disrespectful to call people cheaters, when they are grabbing money in exchange for other people's work! If anything, that is cheating. Elementary OS are so entitled its untrue.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Add nag screens.
And/Or add onerous annual expiration.
Or sit back and let the downloads flow, and make it up in volume. Even a dollar averaged over every 10 000 adds up.
Others offset it by mining user data and charging companies to target ads to their users
Just because you pay doesn't guarantee anything:
Samsung:http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/11/8017771/samsung-smart-tvs-inserting-unwanted-ads, http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa...
My paid for virus checker, bitdefender pops up adds for me to buy the latest version (before my subscription is up), interrupting games.
By a dvd, go to the movies, have to watch advertisements.
People will try to extract as much money out of you as they can, that is what capitalism is all about, just because you have paid doesn't stop or even encourage them to stop making money out of you in as many ways as they possibly can. I fact I feel it is sometimes the opposite, the more you pay the more they want.
"We want users to understand that paying for software is important"
I am absolutely certain RMS would find that statement distasteful and wouldn't appreciate it being linked to a GPL project. He envisions an environment where payment comes from being paid to improve the software, rather than software existing and then demanding payment.
I suppose it's up to them, but if you're not happy with the way free software works, then perhaps choosing to take advantage of the GPL was a dumb idea. Did elementary OS's developers pay for all the previous linux development they're standing on the shoulders of?
For shame.
If you want me to pay, don't offer it for free.
If we want to see the world of open source software grow, we should encourage users to pay for its development; otherwise it'll be underfunded or developers will have to resort to backdoor deals and advertising.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what open source is and why. It doesnt have to be free as in beer, but you do need to provide the source code. If you want to charge customers for the service of compiling that code for them, so be it, but shaming them with zero dollars misses the point. Open source can generate revenue through support, as is evidenced by RedHat. Deployment and professional services are also other methods to fund open source, but insisting developers will eventually be forced to cobble their projects like bootloaders and ui elements to adware is misplaced. in many cases open source software exists explicitly because this intrusive model of profiteering is a detrement to some aspect of computing.
open source will grow with or without cash money millionaires funding project managers and department leads; thats never been what open source is fundamentally about. Its about a hacker ethos, the drive to solve problems for fame and the challenge. Doing that kind of work can land you a legitimate spot developing the kernel at RedHat, or working on the next Barracuda firewall or netapp filer because you've proven through participation that youre capable and highly skilled. It seems to me the only people who wouldnt benefit from this donation are C levels, management, and people who dont just shut up and hack.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Open Source is not just software that people can get for free. Open Source needs many contributors - but those people won't see any of the "donations" these companies get. Why would I, the unknown stuntman^w developer, keep contributing if someone else gets paid for my work? Is my time free and theirs isn't?
Seeing as both of those distributions are using packages that I coded in my own free time and contributed to the open source world, I feel fine typing $0. That is exactly how much they paid me for my work.
If I enter -$1000 will they credit my PayPal account?
Call it what it is - guilting people into donating by making them more conscious of the fact that they're not donating by making them type $0 into a box so they feel like a piece of crap.
It's not about awareness.
Bad marketing: make users feel guilty everytime they try to acquire your product, especially when you are just one of hundreds of derivatives of the same free product (viz. Ubuntu, Debian, and other Linux-based OS'es).
Good marketing: write a blog entry about some trivially controversial aspect of your product and get it posted to a major tech forum for Linux enthusiasts.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
...so into openness their website has flash on it...
Not that I'm really a fan of Ubuntu, but I've never had to do anything but click through to the download.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
Last I checked, most companies that want to make money with open source do better with providing services anyway.
I thought I was being really generous with my $3 billion dollar donation, but when I checked my bank account I saw a credit for $1,294,967,297 - did I just crash the project?
So the linux distro maintainers want to get paid for the 99% of code done by the gpl open source community? How about they start from scratch and write their own fucking kernel and user space software and then they could charge whatever they want.
But, imagine if the whole linux community feels this way and we start seeing adware included with all software packages that are free, well, then it's bye bye linux and hello Windows for good. Nobody is forcing anybody to develop for the gpl open source.
By forcing users to enter $0 when they download, don't they make the users implicitly commit to a statement that the software is worthless?
Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right [sic].
I thought it was something to do with Perl.
Grease Monkey / Usersript
Set value to $0 and hide it
http://pastebin.com/cWjqcacC
$1 would lead to an argument? Oh yeah.
It's not just the money that you're giving them, it's information that goes with it.
There's a huge difference between paying $0 and paying $0.01, because of the personal data you'd have to submit.
Now, if they accepted bitcoin on the other hand...
that their blog is on tumblr. Fucking tumblr.
I don't understand this at all. On my OS, I type $0 to get the name of the invoking command in a shell script. It's elementary, because a sophisticated user will worry about symlinks and the like...
We can all see the direction in which sponsored software development will take us with the fiasco known as systemd.
Systemd, sponsored by large corporate interests, will eventually destroy the entire free Linux ecosystem as we know it by imposing a monolithic schema to which all else must adhere.
Software development is not that difficult to require continued sponsorship. If open source software creators cannot subsist on the love alone then let them find another avocation. In the long term, the community will be much better for it.
The problem is elementary, my dear Watson - they didn't create the OS that they're selling.
99% of all linux distros could DIAF and nobody would notice the difference. They all use the same software, the same kernel, the same window managers, the same services ... come on, enough already!
Both linux and android are suffering from fragmentation. About the only free OS that isn't is BSD, with FreeBSD being more popular than all the other *BSDs combined.
I blame the GPL for much of this. Getting the software for free but paying support is not going to work for consumers, not for an OS, not for games, not for productivity software. Open source has become like app development - a few big names make money, and 99% either starve or become beggarware or adware. Why? Because people in this market have gotten too used to the idea that the right price for everything is $0.00. Look what happened to Loki Games as just one of many examples.
And too often, you end up getting exactly what you pay for. In this case, an OS that has long ago abandoned first principles. UIs that keep adding more bling. A moribund (do I dare say "dead") marketplace where, because of the GPL, you can't split development costs over product sales for the next year, because the first one to buy is going to give it away, or sell it at a reduced cost to the next one, and so on, and so on ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I really don't see what the big deal is here. Sure, they aren't responsible for most of the software in their repositories... like all other distros. They still work to maintain this distribution. If they ask to get paid, what's the matter? If you can have access to a distribution made possible only through hours and hours of hard work at the cost of feeling guilty for a second as you type "0$", I don't think you have any reason to complain, honestly. You're not being forced to pay in any way. There is nothing morally wrong with this. I encourage other developpers to do the same if they want some compensation.
Man, slashdot is really grumpy today.
This really seems like the 21st century equivalent of Bill Gates' infamous "Open Letter To Hobbyists". It's in the same, moaning spirit but has little of the legitimacy in its complaint. Much as I dislike Mr. Gates and his ilk his point was, at the very least, logically consistent as far as the business model for DOS went. People were sharing the OS and copying the disks which was not how the software was sold, whatever you think about the proprietary model that was the deal and people broke it. These Elementary folks seem to be bemoaning the open model that has allowed them to take the work of others, repackage it and add some of their own work to it for not being a sustainable model for recouping their investment, be it time, effort or monetary. There's a very simple solution to this, if you think that your addition truly consists of sufficient value that something free demands a charge then don't release it for free. You don't have to make the ISO or your repositories freely available, all the GPL requires is that you share the source code, perhaps as part of a paywalled download area or physical media you sell? No, that won't work though. They want to do what SkyOS failed at (except, again, with much less of their original work included) and sell something that only a minority of OS enthusiasts will take on as if it had the power and visibility of a Windows or OS X and now that it's not working they're getting bitter. Elementary OS may be a great product for the Linux newbie but with this kind of thinking in its community it's going nowhere.
The critics are worse than the position Elementary OS has itself taken on this matter. First off “Free software” is software that respects users' freedom and community. It has nothing to do with the price of the software. 2nd “1%” is not an insignificant contribution. 3rd most code contributions are not without compensation as might be the case with Elementary OS. Most code is contributed by paid developers working for commercial enterprises such as Redhat, Google, Sun, and others.
Next how can you criticize Elementary OS for not funding upstream projects when its not even raising enough money to keep its own operations going? Besides that they probably are contributing bug fixes and code upstream so the whole point about not contributing upstream is mute.
Yes- you should contribute something financially if your able, and if your smart enough you should try and find an upstream project or two that is lacking in proceeds. Preferably not those for which are already well funded.
They really aren't 'developing' anything, sure putting together a nice interface takes work but they really aren't doing anything a determined user couldn't do themselves.
and now you know why the UI of an open source project sucks rocks.
It doesn't matter if the engine purrs like a kitten under the hood if you can't find the ignition or work the clutch.
The determined user is almost by definition someone with a problem to be solved and no time to battle an intransigent UI or hack out a solution of his own --- even if he had the necessary skills.
Not really. It's somewhat similar in that they ask for donations, but Canonical are also giving users a chance to choose where that money goes toward (if we're going on faith, anyway). And there is no need to type anything, as there are sliding bars and a button at the bottom saying "not now", which sends you to the download.
Then again I typically use the official torrent with every Ubuntu release I use, so I never see this screen to begin with. That's my way of giving back, considering I have no funds to donate.
Creating software isn't cheap, or effortless, however once it is completed it can be duplicated and shared at near no additional costs.
So using good old Economics 101 supply and demand you have a fixed demand, and an infinite supply, so the market rate for any software is near $0.00 below the cost to make it. Software does want to be free.
The old RMS model of making money off of software is selling the distribution. Putting it on Tape, Disk, CD... Some physical media, then you can add manuals to jack up the price. These physical media reduces the available supply so you can make money off of software. Now with nearly everyone with high-enough speed internet access, such physical distribution of software is antiquated. And not a good business model.
The next method of making money off of software is by selling the service behind it. There is a limited supply of people who know how to use the software well enough to help implement it. So the software is free, but you sell consulting services to help people with getting the software working and maintaining it. This works if the software is sufficiently complex enough that the end user can't just pick it up. If your app is designed to be user friendly, and your customer wants it to be user friendly, then consulting service may not work for your product.
We come to Software as a service, cloud computing, remote hosting.... Where we sell the connectivity to the software and perform the maintenance on it. You no longer have access to the actual software you just interface with it. This method is limiting the distribution of the software and limits the number of people who know fully how to use it. Keeping supply down.
Now we have commercial software. There are Legal, technical, locks on the software to restrict unregulated distribution of the software. So the supply is managed at a level, and the demand of the software affects its price.
The Begging for donations business model. Your model is dependent on updates and fixes, so don't push the software you push the service of keeping it up to date, and frequency of quality updates is your supply which you can limit, and individual demand of keeping on getting these updates will supply your money.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For some values of ethical. You do know Peeps are made from gelatin, and that's made from real, dead animals. You are on a site that's purported be host to a bunch of precisionist nerds, after all.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I use this a lot in my shell scripts, mainly in a prepackaged usage message that I fill out as the script progresses to refer to its name. However you still have to type the name of the script to be able to use it from the shell otherwise $0 won't exist with any meaningful context. Other arguments like $1, $2 or even $* I use getopts - no use going overboard when processing arguments.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There's another basic form of payment one can get as a free software developer that isn't mentioned here (in the summary at least), and that's payment in the form of more free software. You spend some time writing some sofware, make it available under the GPL and encourage others to use it, modify it and share it. If in the end this leads to the production of at least one other free software project of similar size that you find useful, then you've made back the lost time you spend writing your program in the first place. As a bonus, the body of free software has grown by at least two in the process.
As an example, let's say I write a raytracing library, and it takes me 500 work hours to do so. Then somebody uses it to write something like Blender. If Blender saves me 500 work hours over the years, then that by itself makes it worth it. And as a very nice bonus, libraytrace+Blender together will save lots of time for many other people too, since they won't need to implement these things themselves.
If I enter -$5, will I get a check?
it was also difficult to use the write words in the rite places.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
* be...cause I've never downloaded Elementary OS.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Pay me for bug testing.
What happened to "free as in freedom, not free as in beer"? It is not true that open source can always be acquired without charge when it comes to new open source software or customization and extensions.
One of the reasons I walked away from open source and why I only provide basic maintenance on my own open source project is because of attitudes like what I'm seeing from the posts modded up. A post I made to Slashdot in 2011 reflects my attitude towards freeloaders.
The fact that I have built my open source project completely from the ground up, needing no other open source code to run (it runs as a native Windows binary), merely changes the excuses freeloaders have come up with over the years.
Sure, the software is free, but if you want service or support, well, you're not a paying customer. If you want me to handle a RFC violating DNS packet the exact same way BIND handles it because of some ignorant notion that you have to act like BIND bug for bug to "follow standards", there better be money on the table. If you want me to hold your hand in a private email conversation, again, show me the email. If you want to flame me for not providing no more support than basic maintenance (security fixes, updating the software to work in newer Linux distributions), that's your prerogative, but it sure as hell isn't going to goad me in to working for you for free.
My program is my gift to the world. It's a gift: Take it or leave it. But, if you want more, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL).
I'm glad this post came up so I could experience the attitude freeloaders have again. It makes me feel a little more comfortable deciding to not fix an issue caused by my DNS server not resolving RFC violating DNS packets identically to BIND bug for bug.
Open source software is for the most part commodity stuff. Anything with differentiating value per se is going to stay proprietary. Firefox, for example, isn't a big deal because there are so many browsers. All free. Commodity. I've paid for internet browsers before back in the day, because they didn't used to be a commodity. Now every device I buy better have one. My car has one. FFS. No way in hell I am paying for a browser. Or any other commodity software that is free to distribute. FFS. Porn is free now. Ad free porn, even. You want me to pay for open source, but I don't even pay for porn. Seriously. No fucking way. Even Microsoft is giving Visual Studio away because Eclipse partly commoditized it. Now they are handing it out free full feature, just to hook you on Azure. Pay for open source indeed.
I've downloaded Ubuntu plenty of times and never had to enter a '$0' anywhere.
Why do they want to know what shell I'm running? Good luck with Shellshock bro! I'm behind 7 proxies!
-- My Sig is a P228.
Take Ubuntu, install Gnome 3 and Plank dock then give it a new name.
Of course you have to type "$0". How can you expect to get away with omitting the name of the command you want to run?
chinook:% echo $0
bash
Now I'm totally confused. Zero dollars equals bash. Bash what? Bash head into keyboard? ORP BASH!
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I'm not a fan of their website and download pages as I'm usually looking for the alternate CD or net install stuff.