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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.
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.
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.
Go Check Distrowatch.
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity.
It was the #8 Distro in 2014, and the #6 Distro in the last 3 Months.
I use it personally... and while I'm probably going to switch to CrunchBang... elementary OS Luna has been been a pleasure to use. .iso that's over 800mb... Luna was small enough to still fit on a CDROM.
It's faster/more responsive than Vanilla Ubuntu with Unity, and has more functionality.
While the Beta version, Currently in development, is an
Most Slashdotters will probably hate it because the look+feel is very much like OSX [and because it's ubuntu based and not pure Debian],
But the Developers have in my opinion, done a good job... and it's as "Standards Compliant" as they can make it.
It's not, dispuie what most people think, a Gnome fork, or reskin [1.0 used Gnome.... but current stable and future releases use a Desktop Environment developed by them].
They have also mentioned switching to Debian as the core for the release that follows Freya.
Relevant quote:
An analysis of the 2.8 million lines of code that were contributed to the Linux kernel between December 24, 2008 and January 10, 2010, reveals 75 percent of Linux code is now written by paid developers. The three biggest Linux code contributors are Red Hat, Intel and IBM.
The most striking aspect of the analysis, however, was where those lines of code originated from. 18% of contributions to the kernel were made without a specific corporate affiliation, suggesting true volunteer efforts. An additional 7% weren't classified. The remainder were from people working for specific companies in roles where developing that code was a major requirement. "75% of the code comes from people paid to do it," Corbet said.
Within that field, Red Hat topped that chart with 12%, followed by Intel with 8%, IBM and Novell with 6% each, and Oracle 3%. Despite the clear commercial rivalry between those players, central kernel development worked well, Corbet noted.
More info at APC.