71–80 of 91 posts
I think Kilo Dalton's comment pretty much sums it up: > 1) make a donation > 2) sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping > 3) grab a tasty beverage
Already exists: http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate
Or http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop#services if you want to make it a truly commercial relationship.
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Honestly, what I get from your comment is that you don't like ads. If you don't like them, don't click them: problem solved. I have to grant you that Ubuntu hardware would be awesome but I'm afraid that it might create an incentive to drop support for non-Ubuntu hardware.
"If you don't like them, don't click them" is a terrible solution, because I don't even want to see them . Is it so wrong that I don't want "free" things if that means I'm the product and not the customer? Is that really such a hard market opportunity to exploit? I'd rather pay money to not see them. Problem solved.
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"If you don't like them, don't click them" is a terrible solution, because I don't even want to see them . Is it so wrong that I don't want "free" things if that means I'm the product and not the customer? Is that really such a hard market opportunity to exploit? I'd rather pay money to not see them. Problem solved.
There's nothing wrong with that but I do think it would be a much harder market opportunity to exploit. You are definitely in a minority. Also, just a nitpick but if you don't click ads you are not a product since Amazon doesn't buy products who merely view its ads.
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There's nothing wrong with that but I do think it would be a much harder market opportunity to exploit. You are definitely in a minority. Also, just a nitpick but if you don't click ads you are not a product since Amazon doesn't buy products who merely view its ads.
And yet, look at Apple's profits.
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I think it shows a clear understanding of business models. In an ad-supported service, the advertiser is the customer and the user is the product being sold.
When you read The New York Times or WSJ or even Daring Fireball, do you feel like you're the product being sold?
The bigger issue is Ubuntu isn't a product. It's a nice community layer with some high level project management spearheading the direction and a team of core developers adding nifty features. If there is paying for the product then how is that money distributed to Jack John Johnson the guy doing patch fixes on his free time because he enjoys it. Does he get a salary? Some kind of financial bonus? Then you've got the…
I would assume, were Canonical to start selling Ubuntu, that some part of the profits would find its way upstream.
It's difficult to envisage charging for the distribution ending well, but you can already pay Canonical for support if you'd like to, and I'm sure they'd be happy to tell you how to disable the "advertising". TBH, though, I'm not sure how Canonical's relationship with Amazon search is any different from what Mozilla do with Google search.
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned the obvious solution: go with the Apple model and build Ubuntu machines. Sure, Apple made some money from selling OS X at $129. It's making less now. But new OS sales were never the reason for Apple to remain closed source. That had more to do with branding/marketing. Not many people remember that one of the reasons Steve killed the affiliate program is that the Mac affiliates…
The trouble is Canonical is and has always been a software company, and Apple is a hardware company (or at least its roots were). To make Canonical in a hardware direction under the Canonical brand, at a level to compete with existing hardware manufacturers, would take a fantastic amount of investment. They are making steps in partnering with hardware manufacturers, see the recent Dell linux laptop, and the OEM engin…
Dell (or whoever does this) could win considerable dev/geek sympathy and mindshare with a move like this.
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RedHat charges for RHEL support , not for the software, they give that for free (see CentOS). Canonical also charges for Ubuntu support .
The fact that you need to strip all the references to Redhat and recompile all packages from source (aka CentOS) and can't actually just get the install image from Redhat like you can with Ubuntu means they don't give RHEL away for free.
The main selling point of RHEL is the stability and long term support that makes software vendors like Oracle comfortable supporting it as a platform. If you install CentOS you get that, perfectly free and open source. How is that not giving RHEL away for free?