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Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

blog.elementary.io

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Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#81

Post by toyg »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
toyg wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As reported here http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.331272.2... : Revenues of WinZip Computing (WinZip) 2003 - $25,259,000 2004 - $24,928,000 2005 - $22,700,000 Peanuts?

Thanks for that particular link, it highlights possible explanation - "Never subestimate the power of enterprise licenses". So it's entirely possible that almost no user buys it, but they get their money from enterprises. I'd love to see a breakdown if one's available.

Somebody in the thread says he bought it. My experience is that a lot of SMEs and professionals did buy it. The price was so low, and at one point its features were really essential.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#82

Post by krat0sprakhar »

ekianjo wrote: post #34
orik wrote: post #22

Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. I'd like point out a couple of quotes. https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.eleme... >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. Elementary's self-important attitude has and continues to completely baffle me. People joke about ElementaryOS being just Ubuntu + Pantheon Sh…

> Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS. It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communit…

Even if their OS is nothing but Ubuntu + Pantheon wrapped in a fancy cover how does that make them 'wrong' for asking money for their efforts? How exactly is this different from someone making a fancy HTML5 bootstrap based template for wordpress and then charging money for it? Clearly the number of man-hours gone into making that template is nothing compared to the effort spent on bootstrap and wordpress - which are both free and open-source.

Lastly, concluding that asking money for your work (alongside providing free downloads) is akin to 'they are only in for the money' affirms my fears that I cannot even dream of living off of any open source software that I make.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#83

Post by unicornporn »

ekianjo wrote: post #34
orik wrote: post #22

Here's a mirror of the original version of this blog post. I'd like point out a couple of quotes. https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.eleme... >We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software. Elementary's self-important attitude has and continues to completely baffle me. People joke about ElementaryOS being just Ubuntu + Pantheon Sh…

> Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS. It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communit…

Daniel recently quit hos job to work full time on Elementary[1]. Perhaps that is one reason they've been pursuing this shaming for not paying strategy lately.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/danielfore/status/583810531766722...

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#84

Post by diggan »

SunShiranui wrote: post #52
joosters wrote: post #25

But it's entirely the wrong time to try and charge customers. How can I decide how much to pay for it before I've even downloaded the thing? (Also, the shading on the payment buttons is so minor that it is very difficult to see which one is selected on my iPad screen)

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but don't we pay for most products before actually being able to use them?

A normal, physical product, yeah sure. But most SaaS, Baas or any other software project usually have a demo/trial for you to use before deciding if it's worth paying for.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#85

Post by TeMPOraL »

toyg wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vend…

> A nagging pop-up is literally saying "fuck you" to your users. Does any charity worker asking for money "literally" say "fuck you" to people? Honestly, I can't see your point. If done well, asking for donation does not have to be annoying. > just like people switch from WinRAR to 7zip mostly because the latter doesn't nag 7Zip is free opensource; WinZip is closed-source time-limited shareware which nags once the ti…

> Does any charity worker asking for money "literally" say "fuck you" to people? Honestly, I can't see your point. If done well, asking for donation does not have to be annoying.

If done well. In terms of charity, I find that the "worthiness" of charity is mostly inversely proportional to the amount of effort they spend on direct marketing (I often see the same about businesses, btw.). If you're going to nag me with ads or stop on the street and ask for money while being obnoxious about it (certain environmental organization comes to mind), you can bet I'll be blacklisting your charity from the group I'm even considering to support.

I like to pay. I hate being tricked, guilt-tripped or forced into paying.

> Why should I pay you if I don't even know whether your product actually works to my satisfaction? Once I'm happy with it, and you politely remind me that such lovely products don't grow on trees, I'm much more inclined to pay.

Fine, but if you expect me to pay for it eventually, apart from politely reminding me, please keep saying up-front that you expect to be paid.

Maybe what I'm really afraid here is the slippery slope - once you establish that it's ok to "remind people to pay" in FLOSS products, it will slowly creep up to the point of being annoying, and I'd hate to see that happen.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#86

Post by onli »

SunShiranui wrote: post #45
ekianjo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS. It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communit…

While the amount of work those upstream projects have contributed is indeed monumental, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss elementary OS' contribution to the free software operating system landscape. I think their work in providing a good UX for GNU\Linux operating systems is admirable and it's a very important step to really make something most would be happy to use.

Why do you think that? Elementary is not the first distribution to focus on user experience and usability. Especially Ubuntu, on which they build their system, had that goal in mind, it's even in the name.

For me personally, I did not see much more in Elementary than an OSX clone.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#87

Post by ekianjo »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #82
ekianjo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS. It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communit…

Even if their OS is nothing but Ubuntu + Pantheon wrapped in a fancy cover how does that make them 'wrong' for asking money for their efforts? How exactly is this different from someone making a fancy HTML5 bootstrap based template for wordpress and then charging money for it? Clearly the number of man-hours gone into making that template is nothing compared to the effort spent on bootstrap and wordpress - which are…

> make them 'wrong' for asking money for their efforts?

It's wrong in the sense that they make it look they are making you pay for the OS, while they don't take care of the OS actually, and they don't give back money to those who make the OS in the first place which is the cornerstone of the cathedral.

It would be way more honest if they were simply selling the binary for Pantheon and charging only for that (close the a HTML5 template in that sense that it's separated from the base install).

I'm not against charging for your work, I'm against the attitude of entitlement they have as if they were responsible for the whole thing in the first place.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#88

Post by embik »

brusch64 wrote: post #76
embik wrote: post #59

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 terrib…

If there are volunteers doing this work (unpaid ?) - what are you using this money for ? Just for infrastructure ? If not, how do you get paid ? And how many percent of the developers get paid ? Who makes the decision who gets paid and who doesn't get paid ? I am just interested how something like this is done in an open source project. I've seen some other projects (not programming related) which got really complica…

Mh, as hinted I'm not part of the core team, so I cannot say anything definite, but a lot of money is going into bug bounties: https://www.bountysource.com/teams/elementary/bounties (a blog entry from february talks about $15,000 total in bounties and $3,470 to upstream projects). These bug bounties are paid out to contributors solving nasty bugs, but it's open to everyone to solve these bugs and get the bounties.

Currently there is only one person really employed by elementary LLC (and paid regular), and that's Daniel Foré, the project lead. He quitted his job, but from what I understand, he earns significantly less than in his job before. Everyone else is "only" getting money from bug bounties.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#89

Post by ekianjo »

unicornporn wrote: post #83
ekianjo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or GNU Tools Yeah, totally agree - no matter how much they do, their work is close to nil compared to what was accomplished because of GNU tools, Linux kernel work and Ubuntu specific improvements made over the past xx years before ElementaryOS. It's like they are only in for the money, which does not sit very well with this kind of communit…

Daniel recently quit hos job to work full time on Elementary[1]. Perhaps that is one reason they've been pursuing this shaming for not paying strategy lately. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/danielfore/status/583810531766722...

> Daniel recently quit hos job to work full time on Elementary

Fine, that's his decision, but he does not need to make it others' fault to pursue his lifestyle.

Re: Payments – Why we make you type "$0"

#90

Post by sudioStudio64 »

For all of the people asking about contributions to the OS...its a fact that most people who work on Linux aren't volunteers anymore. Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel. The same goes for a lot of the work that is done on distributions...even the free ones.

These guys are doing some great work and it would really be a shame if it didn't continue. They are attempting to put together the kind of polished end user experience that Linux has never had. That's a good thing. It would probably be best if they could find another funding source besides end users because the Linux community has a pretty bad track record of supporting these kinds of efforts.

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