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Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#22Am I just blind or where the heck are those ads on Ubuntu? I use it exclusively all day and I just cannot find ads anywhere (other than on websites in the browser, but that's not Ubuntu's fault).
There are no ads. But if you use Ubuntu to search for stuff, and it searches for stuff and shows you the results, then some people seem to want to call those results "ads" where they represent products that you'd need to pay for to obtain.
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#23This seems like a really bad idea to me. You can't charge for something that the user can just build themselves for free. Someone else is just going to distribute the binaries. And so what do you do about your repos, are those just for paying customers as well? You wind up with 2 Ubuntus in this scenario, both weaker than the 1 today.
Centos does the same, isn't Redhat making money ?
The thing RedHat sells isn't the OS itself.
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#24Getting pretty tired of these "dear company, let me pay for your product instead of showing me ads" arguments. They show a lack of understanding of business models.
What? Since when has charging customers not been a business model?
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#25Getting pretty tired of these "dear company, let me pay for your product instead of showing me ads" arguments. They show a lack of understanding of business models.
So you're saying companies are forced to accept "exclusive" clauses in ad contracts, where ad-viewers aren't allowed to have a method of paying to opt-out of viewing ads?
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#26Are you willing to pay one dollar every time you open up a web browser in Ubuntu? Or even one dollar a day? Look into what advertisers are paying, I'm betting you're not willing to match their price.
I highly doubt they're going to make a buck a day from even 1/4 of the userbase from search ads.
Also, they're not being paid every time someone opens their browser. They're paid if someone searches in the Unity lens, sees something they like, clicks on the link, and buys something within 24 hours from Amazon. Amazon's commission rates are I think they'll be lucky to make $100k from it.
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#27Getting pretty tired of these "dear company, let me pay for your product instead of showing me ads" arguments. They show a lack of understanding of business models.
I am not a business guy and don't need to understand what their model is. I understand my model - that I test network software and I don't want to trudge through amazon lookups in wireshark.
What's important is to watch the money flow. The article makes a great point - If money goes like this:
you -> developer
you -> advertising company -> developer
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#28Already exists: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate
Exactly - a requirement for payment will never happen. I think the author is forgetting the base ethos behind this OS - i.e. it is FOSS. If you want to support the project with your money, donate instead.
I initially thought that the idea to integrate Amazon was a very bad thing - but I think it could be useful. I use Amazon for many purchases, with the shopping lens search results from Amazon will be available via the launcher.
However, I think the lens should be easy to disable - especially since user data will be sent to a third party by default. At present the package can be removed, but this might not be intuitive enough for some users [1]
I also think the store / aggregator associated with shopping lens should be configurable to avoid providing Amazon with a monopoly over other sellers.
[1] sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Centos does the same, isn't Redhat making money ?
The thing RedHat sells isn't the OS itself.
This is a little bit off-topic but... they removed basic support and now there's a "self-support subscription" option instead for $350.
If you don't get support for that subscription, I can't see a difference worth $350 between RHEL self-support subscription and CentOS.
EDIT: ate a word
EDIT 2: self-support desktop subscription is just $49. But the point is the same: no support.
Re: Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
#30I suppose you could always mail them a cheque, they might even cash it.
As I've said before, I don't see how this kind on monetisation would be practical for Ubuntu unless they took chunks of their software (such as Unity) and made them closed source.
If there was a sticker price attached to Ubuntu and an activation system (ala Windows) somebody would simply fork the code minus the activation and make a free clone.
Basically the same as Redhat/CentOS.
Their best way of monetising the desktop is probably to make their app store less crappy and get some paid apps in there.
If they can't get enough third parties involved , maybe they can get the ball rolling with their own proprietary paid apps.
Their main customer base right now is probably developers, so a good start might be a nice GUI DB admin tool and a good debugging proxy (ala Fiddler) and they could start monetising tomorrow.