301–310 of 469 posts
In the last hour or so (I think since this hit the front page) there have been approximately €2000 of donations added to the drive at https://gnupg.org/ , nudging it over €40000. Please do your part, and keep that bar moving.
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AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
> AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical…
Circa 2008, before the Unity and Pulseaudio switches, it was considered by pretty much everyone the premiere Linux distro. I don't see why they could not get support contracts with Dell, HP, etc to sell Ubuntu computers and provide the tech support in exchange for positive cash flows.
Even today Dell is still doing Sputnik and in European countries you can buy HP hardware with Linux. Why is Canonical not taking advantage of the fact that they could be making money off support for their desktop OS through all the hardware vendors?
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Thanks for the link, just donated!
Me too. This software is too important to not have someone dedicated to it full time. I left a note that he (like the EFF and the ACLU) should have a recurring donation option, or at least an option to receive a once yearly email asking for a donation. There are many people that would happily go with a recurring donation if that option were available.
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Seems odd that the MANY projects dependent on GPG don't donate enough to GPG to employ one guy. Do Free Software project with funding 'pay it forward' to the volunteers on other projects they heavily depend on? (I don't really know) If not, they deserve to suffer the consequences.
A cultural and structural change is needed when things like GPG get nothing, while viral, superficial and gimmicky work gets snapped up for millions or billions, when end users choose free products that threaten privacy and flood our world with advertising rather than pay the price of a cup of coffee for quality trustworthy products. Even sadder is the fact that these "free" things actually cost us much, much more. h…
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That could be an interesting project for someone. I suspect the hardest bit would be how you determine which projects are most important or most deserving of donations. As soon as money is involved, people will try to game it and spam it.
I think the simplest method would be to consider total amount of donated money.
Calling GnuPG "email encryption software" really understates its importance. It's also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat. Here is a link to the donation page: https://gnupg.org/donate/index.html
exactly. Given the number of corporate laptops encrypted by the corporate IT with that software , and thus definitely some "license" style good money were paid by the corporations to some entities ... i never believed in the magical concept of trickle down and sounds like it doesn't work here too.
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AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation.
> AFAIK Ubuntu is profitable for Canonical, so I wouldn't call that a donation. Unfortunately, that is very far from true. Ubuntu was negative $21 million USD in 2013[1]. Canonical would literally make money by just not doing Ubuntu anymore.[2] (Every time Canonical is on the verge of bankruptcy, Shuttleworth re-seeds back into the company from his personal checkbook) [1] http://www.scribd.com/doc/199373896/Canonical…