Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

Someone could put the code on github and have an s3 download link up in all of 5 minutes. A blog post and 15 minutes of retweets later and it has the number 1 spot on Google for elementary os.

It's incredibly trivial to spread gpl code now so charging for it is a non starter and just makes you look a bit foolish.

The devil is in the details... if done well, you wouldn't be interrupted. Maybe springing it at login, or waking, or at some other time when a surprise might be more welcome.

(Also, I hate the word "donation" tbh. It communicates a sense of hopelessness, of misery, that is just sad IMHO.)

Before Microsoft included decent compression facilities in Windows, a lot of people did in fact pay for WinZip. I bet some still do, considering it's still on sale -- something that cannot be said for most Linux distributions.

That's a very, very bad idea. It's concepts like this that make computing suck so hard (cf. yesterday's discussion about web being broken). A nagging pop-up is literally saying "fuck you" to your users. Sure, it may work in some cases from financial perspective (though probably not here, just like people switch from WinRAR to 7zip mostly because the latter doesn't nag), but it is crapping on your users.

Software vendors should be honest. You want me to pay you? Say it up-front. You offer me a free version? Don't be surprised me, and most of others, are going to take it. Want to make the free version limited? Say it up-front, but don't beg for money.

Hello everyone, I'm a contributor to elementary (did some small coding and sitting around in their Slack). I'm not 100% sure I should post, but I've seen the HN community being very reasonable, so here we go. Please note I'm in no way official for elementary and I wasn't involved with this blog post at all; I just would like to provide another perspective on the topics discussed here.

Yes, the blog post is/was terrible worded. That "cheating" thing ... Yeah. It was pretty bad. It's a difficult topic to talk about money in FOSS (for obvious reasons) and the blog post did it really the wrong (still does for me, but that's a very personal opinion). I'm also not really okay with the whole pay-before-download thing, but I'm really not the one entitled to make such decisions.

From my point of view, the whole idea was "people should support things they like". I completely understand some do not like Pantheon and think it's a OS X ripoff (I've seen people calling almost everything "osx ripoff", but there are parallels between OS X and elementary, no doubt). Therefore, these don't understand why they should pay for something they do not value. Totally understandable. But there are people who love elementary (even more than OS X, for that matter) and are using it on a daily basis. elementary matters to these people and there are two ways of supporting FOSS projects you are using: Contribute time (code) or money. There are better ways of shifting attention to this, of course. I don't doubt that ...

What baffles me nonetheless is how people view "us" (the elementary devs) for single blog posts and a few design desicions (I'm not talking about the website stuff, more about desktop design) people disagree with. Well, I'm totally biased of course, but there really is no vibe of "money grabing" or "entitlement" around the team. Most of us are young guys from all over the world coding on elementary in their spare time. It's a difficult thing to make money with a desktop-focused Linux distro and there is nobody really making money. Nobody's in for the big bucks. It would be lovely to employ some of the devs full-time, but that's simply not possible at the moment. elementary won't be the next big thing people throw money at, and everyone's aware of that fact.

Regarding "give money back to Ubuntu / GNU / the kernel", which is a difficult topic as well ... I'm trying to get my words right. Let's say, most of these things are in the lucky situation of corporate interest; Canonical is making their money via Ubuntu (server) support and server services (I frankly doubt they make a lot of money via the desktop), same applies to the kernel. The amounts of money elementary could provide to these projects / companies / whatever would show elementary's good intentions, but it'd a drop in the bucket. Whenever possible, elementary tries to bring patches upstream to benefit everyone. As Pantheon is building heavily on top of the GNOME stack, some devs pushed bug fixes and features to GTK or Mutter. We have some guys from Xfce, GNOME and other FOSS projects around to talk about our stuff if we think they would be useful for others. elementary is a really small project with only a few constant contributors, but everyone is trying to give their best.

Hopefully I was able to describe my stance without coming off as entitled. If not, please forgive me.