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 were making better machines than Apple, and people were buying them instead of a "Mac". That reduces Apple's revenue, but more importantly dilutes their brand.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a very different brand proposition from the start. Open is their brand. But so is "convenience", and what could be more convenient than a machine for which you don't have to do research to find out if all the drivers will work?
Just as Apple's goal was to be a hardware company, which sold an operating system to help sell hardware, Canonical would do well to sell a, er, canonical hardware configuration for the purpose of selling the OS. One of the debilitating downfalls of OSS OSes is the lack of reliable/assured compatible hardware (video drivers being a notorious examples). Arrange for manufacture of a "reference design" system with a "it just works" Ubuntu distro thereon for those willing to forgo hardware options to assure a functioning, no geeking-tweaking, Linux platform.
Great idea. Hey, this is Y-Combinator - somebody get on it!
I have had two machines from them: a netbook and a laptop. (I build my own desktop machines.) Overall they have been decent purchases, but...
The netbook: wireless driver for the builtin never worked. I had to buy (and carry around) a USB wifi stick.
The laptop: fingerprint scanner has never worked.
There may be workarounds, but the whole point of buying from an ubuntu-specific vendor was that I shouldn't have to mess around with figuring out why my hardware doesn't work.
A site which won't even show home-page pictures until I roll the cursor over them? (An observation meaning little on its own, but much in light of bstpierre's experience.)
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 engineering services they provide for e.g. set top box manufacturers.
But I think it's unlikely you will see Ubuntu brand hardware any time soon.
Nowdays I think Chinese manufactures make it pretty easy to grab one of those unbranded computers and just sell it with your own brand. Is this not the case?
Simply rebranding basic hardware isn't going to compete with the likes of Apple.
Cheap and cheerful (read: shoddy) hardware would quickly damage the Ubuntu brand, and the good hardware is locked up tight by the big brands. Canonical would need to put in some serious volume or R&D of their own to get good hardware that would lead to a viable Ubuntu hardware brand.
Ubuntu users, at least at the moment, are quite picky about the specs of their PCs.
The way to go would definitely be partnering, and Dell is an obvious choice. There could be a "Ubuntu by Dell" brand, with a "white-label" Dell store under the Ubuntu domain, and they would work together to make sure all hardware is fully supported, is tested and ships with sensible defaults. On the other side, Dell would work with Canonical to make sure only supportable components are sourced, and even, over time, apply mild pressure on its suppliers to provide decent drivers.
Dell (or whoever does this) could win considerable dev/geek sympathy and mindshare with a move like this.
"Mac affiliates were making better machines than Apple"
So by Apple killing this the consumer loses the option to use better machines?
Personally, I wish that I could buy Apple hardware with OSX as an added "option". I could knock $129 off the price by using my own OS. But, truthfully, it's not about price. By being able to use my own bootloader and my own OS^1, I could avoid the sort of hoop jumping longtime Mac users (e.g. John Battelle and Rob Pike) have recently described.
1. At least, having Apple make this easy, not make the user resort to extensive hackery to do it.
Apple makes beautiful hardware. That part of Apple has not changed. The mounting annoyances, if you haven't noticed, all come from Apple's efforts to lock down and exert total control over software.
The idea of paying for Ubuntu, as code, only shows how far afield some Linux users have drifted. There is a difference between paying for support and paying for a license to use some (free) code. If you need help, pay for support. Suggestions to force everyone else to pay for use of free code because you need help make little sense. Is that what this is, or have I misread it?
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 issue of the lower level aspects being a very large part of Ubuntu, is the money in part for them? They're as much the product as Ubuntu One is.
Donations work fine, thats how the community keeps going. You're paying the Ubuntu high level team to continue what they're doing and helping cover the costs. If you like what Ubuntu does, go donate. If they're looking at 3rd party affiliates then maybe they're not getting enough donations, maybe they've been approached and think it's a good fit.
This idea that what Ubuntu does is just some light packaging is pretty demeaning to their true value. Ubuntu really pushed the state of the art in terms of polish for Linux distributions. You can argue how much of the total product value that is but I don't think it's at all reasonable to say "Ubuntu isn't a product" and that it's just a "nice community layer with some high level project management".
I'm also curious about why you take as a given that money needs to be distributed to "Jack John Johnson"? There's certainly nothing in the licenses that forces it, and when Apple takes BSD software and sells it nobody thinks that's out of line. When RedHat charges for RHEL nobody complains either, even though most of the software is open source as well. What line is Ubuntu crossing here?
I think Ubuntu moved away from "polish for Linux distributions" some versions ago. This was the time they've started making their own user interface with Unity, they're own shop with I-don't-know-what-it's-called (App center ?) and their own online storage with Ubuntu one.
They make decisions you may like or may not like (moving the window controls to the left..) - but at least for me it was time to go - and I don't look back.
The fact that that has happened only gives more weight to the idea that they are in fact producing their own product instead of being a light packaging layer over what everyone else does.
It could be taken as pretty demeaning, I accepted that as I wrote it, and I don't think of it in demeaning terms. They do a fantastic job, they have as you say pushed Linux forward a lot, I have nothing but respect for them.
I won't however change my opinion. They did push the state of it forward, but so did Knoppix in many ways, and a fairly large amount of other distros. Are they all products? No, they're projects, with varying levels of success. It's a great platform, but I don't think that classing it as a product is helpful. It's a community project, approaching it like RHEL wouldn't work, they have completely different aims.
My argument isn't that Ubuntu is a quick paint gloss improvement, it's that they've taken the core work and improved it rapidly (although Unity could be argued) and teamed it with their biggest marketable quality which is that they've built a community around their work.
Do they deserve money? Yes, of course, thats why they take donations. Should they sell it as a product, as an actual thing? I don't think so.
(if you're working for Ubuntu, I love you and I'm not being mean!)
I don't work for Ubuntu, I'm just a satisfied user, who moved from Debian to Ubuntu and noticed how big of a step change that was. That of course doesn't mean I don't appreciate the value of Debian and the rest of the community. In fact the value of Ubuntu for me is really "Debian with a lot more polish". And the value of Debian for me has always been "a huge collection of free software neatly packaged".
I actually wasn't arguing if they should charge for it or not, I don't really have an opinion there. My objections to your comment were:
1) Ubuntu isn't just a community, it's also a product and a successful one. You can download their new distribution every 6 months and get a lot of value out of it directly without ever engaging with the community.
2) If Canonical were to charge for Ubuntu, that does not mean they need to distribute money to any developers. It's certainly not required by any of the licenses of the software they package or even any of the customs of the community (see RHEL).
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.
I don't know where you get the idea that you need to compile CentOS from source from? They distribute images that are perfectly equivalent to RedHats images. The resulting installed systems are binary compatible - I suspect it's not a coincidence that the strings "RedHat" and "CentOS" are the same length.
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?
Most/all software that Ubuntu gets from others are released under permissive licenses that explicitly permits reselling of the software. So no, there should be no expectation of money to Jack John Johnson for his freely (as in both beer and freedom) contributed software.
I would assume, were Canonical to start selling Ubuntu, that some part of the profits would find its way upstream.
That argument applies to any revenue stream, not just payments to users --- and, in particular, to the controversial deal with Amazon that is making Ubuntu's revenue streams (more precisely, Canonical's) an issue in the larger community in the first place.
This wouldn't really work for a simple desktop user, seems like doing IT-department friendly crippled releases. Otherwise I was actually considering it...
To find that, you have to go to the home page, click on "community", then "get involved", and then find the little "donate" tab. I went looking the other day and gave up.
Put a friggin' button in the dock on every machine that shows whether you've donated recently. If they can put Amazon affiliate links in the main interface, they can just ask me directly for money.
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.
In this case the product isn't a product, it's an effort. Donations fit the model better as you're donating to the effort of a group of people to manage something, rather than to a group of people creating something from the ground up.
That's not to say the Ubuntu devs don't create anything of additional value.
Am 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).
Why not have a click-through at install or on version upgrades that says something like "we want to install an easy way to add products to your search results for which we get payment: Allow, Deny" ... rather than default install something that is going to cause such negative press.
IFF then there is a wide-scale uptake then there is warrant for auto-install of those features.
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.
Why not donate to the maintainers of Debian, Software in the Public Interest? http://www.debian.org/donations
They are the root of all those awesome dpkg's that we all know and love.
Getting 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
then the developer is only interested in making you happy, because you're the payer. However, if the relationship is like this:
you -> advertising company -> developer
then the developer doesn't really care about you; you're just the means to an end, a vehicle to drive to the place with money. The developer and advertiser will build a business relationship, <cynical> and usually make sure their relationship with you maximizes shareholder (not your) value. </cynical>
Not at all, I think they're insane to think their users will put up with ads. But the amount of revenue from people willing to pay is insignificant. Another way is needed.
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.
But its more nuanced than that. Ubunut (or rather Canonical) is not just an ad-supported service. It has "real" enterprise support customers, it has OEM engineering services, certification services and other things that puts Ubuntu as at least part of the product, if not front and centre. In a multivariate business model like this, the pulls in each direction tend to even out for the betterment of the product as a whole (or pull it apart completely, but with Ubuntu that hasn't happened yet).
I think the simplistic view of Canonicals business model is the problem with the article.
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?
I 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.
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.
Actually reading more about it: this is using Amazon's store search, not their web search as I initially thought. It's also getting money by adding referral codes, rather than Amazon paying Canonical to have their search engine listed. So there's some differences after all.
This 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.
> You can't charge for something that the user can just >build themselves for free.
Um, sure you can. Ubuntu, RedHat, and Slackware are quite successful at this already. Pat Volkerding has been doing it for as long as linux has existed (Slackware). Yes, someone can distribute the binaries, but they can't use the {Ubuntu, RedHat,Slackware} name.
If you have spent a reasonable amount of time with Ubuntu, try installing Debian and playing around with it. Sadly, you will probably notice how Ubuntu have unnecessarily broken things that are working fine in Debian. Core things.
An obvious way is to require some sort of deliberate indication that the user wants shopping results, like a separate pane, or a prefix to the search term. It's a problem largely because it's searching Amazon even when you're just looking for a file on your computer.
Prefix would be good. I guess the Unity way is different keyboard shortcuts (it is possible to limit the search to certain categories). But I won't be able to memorize those.
What it sums up is some Linux nerds' complete disconnection from reality.
1) Donations aren't a sustainable revenue model, and won't prevent Ubuntu from taking equally user-hostile actions in the future. What they need is a sustainable revenue model where users are the customer.
2) How is this different than the crapware that comes installed with some OEM Windows PCs? How is that a model to be emulated? What happens when a feature like this can't just be installed with apt-get?
3) Water would almost certainly be healthier.
Apple used to be the reliable alternative to the Microsoft hegemony. They're squandering that position, and we desperately need something like Ubuntu -- consumer focused, polished, and as easy to use as Mac OS X (or at least, Ubuntu is a lot closer to that ideal than Linux has previously been).
For Ubuntu to maintain a consumer focus, they need the consumers to be their customers, not their product. Let me buy Ubuntu, or buy Ubuntu hardware.
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.
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.
Apple's profits have very little to do with sales of its operating system. As I said, it would be nice to see "Ubuntu machines" but unlike Apple, Canonical would never enjoy a monopoly over Ubuntu hardware due to Ubuntu's open source nature.
I laughed at that comment and reply by the author. I have always wished that Ubuntu had an extra installation layer were we could choose what software to install and what not to install.
I don't see anything wrong with "pay what you want" Ubuntu as long as people who pay don't get special treatment. The easiest way to ensure that would probably be anonymous contributions.
Similarly, certain definite projects like "get X functionality into Y application" could be valid targets for a kickstarter-like projects. Paid-for code released under GPL. Why not ? This measure would be best reserved for unfun tasks, something no one wants to do.
By default, Firefox has an Amazon search listed in the search engine list. Unity lens seem pretty similar.
At present, the Amazon results are only present if you do use the shopping lens or perform an open search. As long as there is an easy way to disable the Amazon results, I don't have a problem with it.
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 < 5% if I remember correctly.
Firefox is more valuable though. They have a revshare agreement with Google and others. People actively use Firefox to search for things, at least a few dozen times a day, not to mention are more apt to click on ads based on their current mindset.
I don't think that same behavior is going to be exhibited in a Unity lens, certainly not with the same frequency. I also doubt the click rate too.
I switched to Linux Mint Debian Edition a while back. Cinnamon is a great desktop. Don't miss the steaming pile of Ubuntu. It was great while it lasted, but then came Unity and now they're hitting us with adverts? I don't get it. Seems like they're trying to kill demand.
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 were making better machines than Apple, and people were buying them instead of a "Mac". That reduces Apple's revenue, but more importantly dilutes their brand.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a very different brand proposition from the start. Open is their brand. But so is "convenience", and what could be more convenient than a machine for which you don't have to do research to find out if all the drivers will work?