Holy freakin' hell that is an awful headline. This is a DONATION, nothing more. Canonical is not asking people to pay, it is asking people to donate if they are so inclined. The press releases states that Ubuntu is and always will be free.
Use Ubuntu and want to give some money for it? Great. Donate. Now there is a way where previously there was none.
Use Ubuntu and don't want to give money? Great. Don't donate.
A) makes it a pain to drag everything to $0 (8 sliders to drag)
B) makes it seem like you're getting a t-shirt too
C) makes me feel bad for downloading it for free.
D) is any of that money going to the Linux Foundation? It's not clear - if not, shame on them.
The linux foundation is responsible for a very small portion of Ubuntu, and is probably one of the most funded parts. When I donate to Canocial to support ubuntu, I expect that money to go to where it will be most useful to making a good product.
It's not a stretch at all, considering it's a partial quote. Read the article before getting into a knot.
If you scroll down you will see a screenshot from Ubuntu which says, "Pay what you think it's worth" which is followed with subtitle text of, "Millions agree that Ubuntu is a great piece of software. But how much do you really think it's worth?"
Nowhere does the article or title imply that you cannot download Ubuntu regardless of your donation. However, Ubuntu themselves has chosen wording which alludes to asking people to pay.
I wish Ubuntu/Canonical would give you the option to donate somewhere else on their site besides via the download page. I set aside ~50$ per month to donate to open source projects. Until now I have not donated to ubuntu since they dont sport a regular donations page
Apart from the fact that they did have a regular donation page, what on earth is stopping you from donating "via" the download page? For all intents and purposes this is the donation page.
Canonical is commercial, the Ubuntu Foundation is not: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/UbuntuFoundation. Ubuntu's been accepting donations for quite a while, long before they added this.
Also, it's not a traditional donation in the Mozilla Firefox sense because you cannot deduct it from your taxes because Canonical is a for-profit commercial organization.
In this form, Canonical overstates an appropriate objective in the tips: support more hardware? How about supporting any, thoroughly?
I have done my best to buy hardware that I thought was to be well supported (on the desktop! because I thought power management would be "too hard", so I've given up on laptops), but as far as I can tell, nobody is home doing the QA and holding back releases (or, by any other means, making sure they work) because of regressions, specifically in the area of hardware/driver issues.
I don't need more half-broken crap. I need at least one thing that does work, all the time, across several releases, for three years at a stretch. I will pay for it. This is not represented among any of their available choices: even the one saying "support more hardware" suggests there is any level of support that is adequate. There is no such thing in end-user Linux-land (and I mean the kernel quite specifically) right now. That's not to fault Linux (although it may deserve it): nobody is withholding releases on the basis of quality on any one integration of hardware.
As much as I despise their corporate philosophical direction, Apple does this very well.
I say these things as a long time Ubuntu user (and still using it) who was pleased with the strides they were making in the mid-2000s, and still thinks they are the only Operating System seriously doing something about about omnibus Free-software usability today. I still have two Ubuntu workstations that are my primary sites of use, but now use it in begrudging concession to my professional needs and personal philosophy: not out of preference in any other dimension, least of which would be "quality."
This makes me sad, but I'm getting too old and impatient to put up with this.
I know how you feel. I'm afraid rock solid QA regarding hardware support seems almost impossible unless you get the manufacturers on board. Apple obviously has it easy in this regard.
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Microsoft has it the easiest, and the result has been mediocrity in reliability (largely on account of bottom-dollar driver authorship), even given its monopoly power in the OEM market. Clearly, "just" locking up the entire OEM market is not enough to Achieve Results. Hence, the signed-driver certification programs we're seeing in recent years, although I have no idea how effective they are.
Apple does a crapload of work to make sure that the one, tiny blessed subset of integrated hardware they select every so often works well during the span of its useful life. Sure, they lean on driver authors of suppliers pretty hard, something which few can do, but they are not nearly as hands-off as Microsoft: the buck stops with them, and a bad integration is Their Fault. And, on the flip side, if you are not an Apple supplier you don't give even two bits about supporting their operating system, for obvious reasons.
If there was a Dell distro and it Did Not Suck, I'd seriously consider it. I consider Ubuntu good-enough, so it could be Ubuntu but carefully tested and with divergent kernel and driver releases when appropriate.
> For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure the support for laptops is more dependable than the support for desktops, especially if you go for an unexciting configuration with Intel graphics etc.
Doubtful, having not long ago possessing such a laptop and sitting next to a colleague in the current-day who has kept with the faith, although with increased grousing. He was, of course, careful with his hardware purchase, buying an ostensibly well-supported Thinkpad. The monitor on his desk still sits unused.
There is so much more to go wrong in common use cases that are eliminated on a desktop (because you can't even do some of them, or wouldn't want to). Wireless chipsets, power management, suspension and hibernation, fiddly bits like special softkeys, hot plugging displays, you name it. The weakest link on the desktop side is the video card, and this has proven to be bad enough for me -- crashes have come and gone for me with each Ubuntu release on a pretty plain-jane NVIDIA card.
They don't have the power to block a release if a three year old laptop is broken. Hence, not nearly good enough. If there was a System76 distro and it wasn't terrible in other dimensions then we'd be talking about something interesting.
Well, I agree that they don't have such power right now, but I don't think it's currently biggest bottleneck (linux doesn't break that often, + LTS releases get more and more usable, for example 12.04 is already good).
The bigger thing currently is to simply buy something and know it will 100% work with at least current Ubuntu. That's unfortune, but it's true.
Presenting this screen before you can actually get the OS does not make much sense for new users. They won't know if "hardware support on more PCs" or "performance optimisations" will be any important for them. It'd be more sensible for this to show up as a built-in screen after you've used Ubuntu for a few months.
It'd be most sensible to show up at multiple, carefully selected points in time.
For example all Xbox Live Arcade games are required to have a trial (demo) which can be seamlessly upgraded to the full version at anytime. Every trial is required to award the player an Xbox Live achievement and Xbox Live Avatar Item at some point. When receiving either a pop-up occurs saying "You've earned <X>, unlock the full game now to keep it". Or something to that effect. Then of course there is a final upsell at the end of the trial.
I think it would be a much better idea to have people give in the beginning, but instead of asking them where the money should go, tell them that their name will be included in the next release as a contributor on their site and in an "About Ubuntu" dialog in the desktop version and /etc/contributors on the server version where it lists the various levels of contributors and their names. This would encourage more businesses to give.
True, the issue in particular with "hardware support" is that the biggest problems desktop users seem to run into with Ubuntu is video drivers for nvidia/ATI and it doesn't seem like there's much canonical can do about those anyway.
ATI drivers? The open source ATI drivers have progressed wonderfully recently. I never even flirt with the idea of tainting my desktops or laptops with proprietary drivers. The situation is different with nvidia but I am still happy with the machine I have with an old nvidia card I purchased for mining btc.
What problems do people have with the free ATI drivers?
I only use nvidia cards (with the proprietary drivers) because they were the only ones I could find with decent framerates playing something like Minecraft at 1080p resolution.
Do the free ATI drivers get 60fps (or even 30fps @ 1080p resolution) for most full screen games? If so, could you tell me which model of card you are achieving this with?
I switched to an nvidia card about a year ago because the free ATI drivers either gave terrible OpenGL performance or some apps didn't work at all because features were missing from the drivers and the proprietary drivers gave me all kinds of horrible glitches.
They're ok for anything but games (for which I use windows anyway), but the power management sucks. I get 3-4.5h with the free driver and 6-7h with the blob.
While you're correct, I think such a message after installation and use will make it feel a little like nagware(a bit like how Windows prompts you to activate it) even if its a one time.
Not a bad idea. The areas where I have the biggest problems with Ubuntu is hardware support and new updates just breaking my system. It's so bad that I REALLY want to just go to Debian Stable as my primary OS. I just can't handle that much downtime to switch over at home and the office.
I'm a developer. I don't give a shit about a fancy desktop. I just want my hardware to work good with the O.S. and for updates not to wreck my system. Why? Because I just want to write code, run what services and daemons I need, and read shit on the internet.
It's really fn frustrating. I've been using Ubuntu for 4 years solid now when I ditched Windows. I'd be willing to donate to the two areas I highlighted, but if shit didn't get better....
Your reference to Debian stable made me curious. Do you think that has less disruption than only installing Ubuntu LTS releases?
I haven't used Debian after switching to Ubuntu pretty early on. These days I stick to LTS on servers but can't resist upgrading to the latest shiny stuff every 6 months. I've had issues with upgrades and assumed that if I had stayed in the LTS path only it would be smoother.
By the way Ubuntu releases an LTS release every two years and the last 3 Debian stable releases have happened at 2 year intervals, so the two seem comparable.
I used Debian stable as my primary OS for a couple of years. While I was just fine without the fancy desktop, at the time Firefox was stuck on version 3.0 even though 3.6 was available.
I don't know what the situation is like now, since I haven't used linux on my laptop for a couple years, but if I were to go back, I would want something like Debian stable, but with an updated browser.
I can imagine it being more useful for things that are easily fixable/less critical.
I was running a testing desktop, and X updated in a way that broke the proprietary nVidia drivers (nVidia's fault -- not Debian's.) That was quite annoying to suddenly have to fix. Those types of issues (though rare, even in testing) would be nice to avoid.
Debian's idea of stable really means super duper rock-solid extremely stable. Which is ok, but I had a hard time running newer software on it. I now use Debian Testing, which is most people's idea of stable. Several debian-derived distros are based on Testing, so it's probably ok.
I am using Crunchbang, which is based on Debian stable. It is trivial to download and install either Firefox or Chrome from the internet, and they automatically update themselves (FF since v12; the betas have had auto-update for longer).
For a more general solution you could look into apt-pinning, but there are some downsides depending on which way you go about it.
I think Unity is the least worthwhile part of Ubuntu but since it's already here, I'd like them to fund an alternative, not remove funding and keep it as it is.
Edit: The page should a "make the desktop less awesome" side of the slider. If Unity is what they mean by "awesome", it should be slid back.
I realize it's not part of the default distribution, but installing xubuntu-desktop is a nearly-painless way to ditch Unity for XFCE. I've been very happy with it.
You can install Cinnamon (the window manager used by Linux Mint), and it's very good. It behaves "traditionally" (i.e. like Windows 7), and it's much prettier than XFCE.
I recently switched to Cinnamon and couldn't be happier.
I never really liked Unity, i used Gnome Shell and it was usable ok. But for my work nothing seems to beat the good old taskbar-based design.
I saw this yesterday when I was experimenting switching from Linux Mint to Ubuntu on one of my laptops (multi-monitor problem that forums hinted were fixed in latest Ubuntu).
What confused me about that page was this:
"Pay what you think it's worth" is a question based on past experience... you either have no experience and think the value is zero or you already have experience and think it's worth $x.
But then all of the options were very clearly angled towards the future and answering a different question "Where would you like us to invest?".
It baffled me as without downloading and using Ubuntu I couldn't give you an indication of what it is worth to me right now, and I couldn't say which part I felt needed investment in the future. Even if I were a regular user of Ubuntu and was upgrading from one LTS to another, how would I know which bit now needs investment until after I'd seen what has changed?
I also could not see any indication that were I to have slid a slider one way, that this guarantees that is where my money will go. In the UK, organisations that take donations are bound to only use such funds for the purpose in which they've been taken, less reasonable administration costs.
Canonical being based in the UK, does that mean that they are creating different accounts per-slider and ring-fencing the funds solely for that use? I doubted it.
I did the only thing I felt was rational and downloaded without a contribution.
To me a more logical thing would be to ask for a contribution after I knew there was value there.
In my case that means to let me install it, see whether it solves my multi-monitor problem, and then suggest I contribute.
Or it could mean that in the support forums or interfaces if a solution removes pain, ask me for money right then... I'll happily give it.
At those points I know the value and know where I want to see future investment. But at download time? Nah, I know nothing.
If you're going to ask for something at the moment of download then a simple tip jar would do the trick. The question of "Where should we invest in the future?" should only be asked after someone is using Ubuntu.
I agree that the page is a bit poor in communicating why you should pay, and cumbersome to use. OTOH, the paypal order page does indicate how much money you put towards each of the goals, so I suppose it is possible they abide with the UK laws.
Personally I would be happy to have a monthly subscription to simply keep Ubuntu improving, even without any additional value on top of what they already provide. I realize this could be done by simply donating monthly. However, in a subscription model they could probably set up a two-way communication channel between them and paying customers, to both help refine their goals and estimate how well they're being met, in a more continuous manner than random donations at download time.
I would like to pay the folks that manage the wonderful apt software repository. Not one red cent to the Unity team, though. I don't like where they are taking Linux.
The repository maintainers seem pretty shy, but I'm pretty sure that the original author behind apt is this guy: https://github.com/jgunthorpe, and you could send him a few dollars using gittip: https://www.gittip.com/
Debian has done a lot, maybe the majority, of what makes Ubuntu possible?
Debian is an actual nonprofit that can accept donations, while Canonical is a for-profit company to which you can only give voluntary payments masquerading as donations?
To many people, Ubuntu represents nothing but a shiny front end build on top of the years of hard work spent on building Debian, the universal OS.
These people (we) are willing to use Ubuntu, since it is pretty much the same thing, but they (we) will never go out and actively support the Ubuntu project as we believe that Debian is more deserving of our support.
I think I (sorta) understand your reasoning, but it doesn't make much sense to me. When I write some application that makes it easier for my clients to do some previously complex tasks and I ask them to tip me, I don't expect them to tell me that the previous system or database did most of what made my work possible.
These "donations" aren't just there to thank developers for past works, but also to equip the distro so that it can improve and continue to push the envelope its way.
Ubuntu's users chose to download and install Ubuntu, not Debian, probably because they like whatever Ubuntu does that you find so insignificant and that other distros aren't doing. I suspect that you too are running Ubuntu, not Debian, for the same reasons.
When Ubuntu asks for money, that's because Ubuntu needs it to keep doing those insignificant Ubuntu stuff, that made you choose to install it, not Debian. So, don't bring up Debian.
When Linux Mint started their own distro, they didn't go all the way down to Debian. Ubuntu probably did something worthwhile, that Mint would rather not do themselves. But people who installed Mint didn't install Ubuntu, so when Mint asks for donations, it's for Mint stuff. Let's not bring up Ubuntu.
While all donations are welcome, it is especially hoped that any businesses that make money through Debian (CD manufacturers, support companies, or even businesses that rely on Debian for day to day operations) will contribute a percentage of their profit to help make Debian the best OS it can be.
Get it? help make Debian the best OS it can be. Let's not bring up GNU or Linux.
Well, you could support both, apportioned however seems reasonable to you ... e.g. "Ok, Debian provide the bulk of the core system, so $50 to Debian, and Ubuntu does some good work tweaking the UI, adding shiny, and holding users' hands, so $5 to them."
Every couple of months, I recharge my Themeforest account (html templates), as well as my Moniker's (domain names). I pay and they credit my account, which makes it easier to buy goods, without the hassle of a payment process. The thing is, while I put in $50, I probably only use $10 at a time and my account can stay credited for months. I'd be ready to bet that by the time my credits have all been spent, the money I originally paid for them has accumulated some interest for these vendors. This revenue model is rather common.
If Ubuntu sold vouchers that allowed me to buy software at a slight discount, rather than connecting to Paypal each time, I'd pay for it. The best part is that it has the numbers and the products to make it work for them as well.
So, the tricky question is - what if we can't afford that? Does that mean that, ethically, I should no longer use the product if I want to honor Canonical's request?
The donation step is optional, so I see no "ethical" dilema here. If you can afford to donate some money to the project you could do it. If not, no problem you should use the product as you see fit.
I suspect that most Ubuntu users can donate 16$ for the project.
I'm not sure what you mean by "can't afford that."
If you think Ubuntu provides you with $X in value but you literally do not have $X to your name, well, I'm not sure how it could be providing $X to you, then.
You could be totally broke and feel like Ubuntu has the potential to provide you with $X in value (by helping you get a job, for example). You could just donate when the value is realized, not before.
Maybe you didn't mean that you literally don't have $X, but instead meant that you might not feel like it's worth paying $X for what you get out of it. In that case your choice of X was simply too high.
I don't really like the phrase "Pay what you think it's worth" for two reasons.
One of my issues with it is that it's easy to think of it as a fixed impersonal price rather than something that varies from person to person at any given time.
The other issue is that, as a developer, I do NOT want users paying what my products are worth to them. I want them to pay less than that, so they get something out of the deal. I want people to be better off for having acquired my software, I do not want to extract 100% of the value they get out of it in exchange.
>If you think Ubuntu provides you with $X in value but you literally do not have $X to your name, well, I'm not sure how it could be providing $X to you, then.
I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.
Imagine I have disposable income of $0 and I currently use Ubuntu. By your reasoning, Ubuntu is worthless to me. However, let's say that if you offered me $1 to stop using Ubuntu, I would say say "no". We can safely conclude that Ubuntu is worth more than $1 to me, even though I don't have $1 to pay for it.
Ability to pay doesn't always equal value created. If I like take walks in a national park, I obviously derive value from that resource, but I don't pay anything for it and it doesn't allow me to generate any additional income.
You certainly do pay for national parks. If you're a citizen, you pay for it in income taxes and any money paid to local businesses while shopping that they then owe in taxes. If you're not a citizen, you're still indirectly paying through taxes paid to businesses while you are on vacation. National parks are not all funded by the entrance fee, they're government-subsidized.
To answer the question, no it is not unethical to use free software for free when you cannot afford to donate. Canonical is not expecting you to pay for it, merely making it clearer that you are able to pay for it if you wish. This comes on the heels of the outcry over Amazon search being built-in, with people asking if Ubuntu is hurting for cash, why is it not easier to give them money?
>You certainly do pay for national parks. If you're a citizen, you pay for it in income taxes and any money paid to local businesses while shopping that they then owe in taxes. If you're not a citizen, you're still indirectly paying through taxes paid to businesses while you are on vacation. National parks are not all funded by the entrance fee, they're government-subsidized.
Yes, but if you're a citizen you "pay" for it in a legally obligated way, so that payment tells an observer nothing about your preferences.
I spoke imprecisely, but my point was that there are resources which are free at the point of use which still have value to the user. Perhaps a national park was a bad example, I should just have said "the countryside".
I wouldn't say the person in you example is unable to afford it, $0 disposable income just means you've chosen to spend all your money in other ways or to save it. So I don't think it's related to the question I was responding to.
Sometimes that "choice" is simply to live indoors and eat meagre meals. Oh, and perhaps to pay for the electricity to run the computer, which I suppose could be seen a s optional -- but saving that little bit of money sort of obviates the value of Ubuntu.
(Oh, and in case you were hoping to read this as typical bleeding-heart liberal craptrap, I live in 80 square feet and use a computer that is looking forward to the coming Core2 family of processors. IDE drives and what's a DDR? Is that like RamBus?)
At a higher level: In my view, when it comes to open source software, beer-free is a part of libre-free.
If you can support the open source projects you use and want to stick around, that'd be good. At a shallow level, it will make them better.
But if you ask an open source maintainer whether a cash-strapped college student or a third-world citizen should avoid using their software because they their donation money could be used for a different purpose..? I hope the answer is no. In fact, I hope the answer extends to "Bill Gates is welcome to use my code without compensating me. Obviously it'd be nice if he did, though."
I'm willing to bet an imaginary nickel that the OSS devs I know would actually be pretty surprised if they received anything at all.
Obviously, the implication is to pay what you think it's worth to you. They're not asking for you to pay the entire industrial value of the Ubuntu ecosystem divided by the number of users.
So, I use Ubuntu as my daily driver. But, I am deeply conflicted about this. Primarily because I have heard/read that Ubuntu does not spend its money on developers (expecially core, kernel, fs) and rides on Debian and Red Hat. Secondly, until fairly recently, parts of Launchpad were closed source. Third - there are other groups like Postgres, Openssh, etc which need funding more desperately.
What will the donation amount of be used for? More marketing - which I understand is equally necessary, but unworthy for me right now - vs things like hiring and paying developers?
I see that - but it would be nice if they covered which groups exactly would be funded by each item. For example, I am all for the hardware support aspect of Ubuntu - I would personally want to fund superior multi-display support and suspend/resume.
Who are the developers in Ubuntu working on it ? In fact, ARE THERE any developers working on it. I would really appreciate some increased transparency here - because as I see it, there are lots of contenders for my money: including LinuxMint, which IMHO needs money more desperately.
Are you insinuating that Ubuntu is just a Debian with a different name slapped on it? If that is the case, then you must not have used Ubuntu at all.
As a Ubuntu user, I like the Ubuntu Software Center and being able to install Skype and Dropbox through it and not having to scour the web for packages compatible with my system. I like some Unity features such as the dash and the HUD, because they greatly simplify discoverability of features that I do not use on a daily basis. I like the fact that Canonical certifies Ubuntu on a variety of hardware and I can therefore purchase my next laptop or server with the knowledge that my preferred OS will work fine on it.
I could go on, but I don't think there is any need - it's pretty clear that Canonical makes a lot of things happen apart from building .deb packages.
Canonical adds all the fun stuff and Debian adds all the boring stuff. But, you can't have the fun stuff without the boring stuff, and it's easy to argue that Ubuntu would not exist without Debian. Letting the user kick a few bucks back to the Debian Foundation wouldn't be the most horrible thing ever.
(I do use Ubnutu, BTW, but regret the decision on a regular basis. I especially like waiting 15 seconds to get a shell prompt because it's checking for package updates to display while I'm logging in. The 15 seconds after each typo'd command is also enjoyable. "Did you mean to install the package sl?" No. No I did not. Ever. </rant>)
On the wait-to-run-commands thing: I've been starting to familiarise myself with the redhat ecosystem and... it's crazy. Want to get yum to provide some installation info on a package on your system? Please wait while we check the servers for any updates...
How do I contribute while discouraging Unity? Doubtless they will interpret "Make the desktop more amazing" as an encouragement rather than the opposite.
I'd say that if enough people change the the ratio of their donation so that "Make The Desktop More Amazing" gets $0 while "Better Support For Flavours Like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu" gets the most of the donation, this might help Canonical get the picture.
How about Canonical pays me for the hours I've spent debugging problems like scripts shipped with bugs or complete changes to the foundations of the operating system which just appear by surprise?
I really like it when motd just randomly became some convoluted set of scripts.
Or when their fancy "Display some dots on the screen instead of kernel output on bootup" thing (Plymouth) only gets properly disabled by GDM and will otherwise continue to draw glowing dots across your window manager and applications. At least, that's what I found when I tried to run XDM + xmonad on my ARM netbook. Eventually had to go in and hack the XDM startup script so it too would properly shut off Plymouth before trying to run.
The donation request doesn't show up if you download Kubuntu. The last I heard Canonical doesn't pay anyone to work specifically on Kubuntu anymore (although Kubuntu users obviously benefit from a great many things Canonical does for Ubuntu). One of the donation categories does include Kubuntu though... Strange.
I'm not sure about the installer demographics or user base of Ubuntu Server, but assuming that users who install the Server edition would be more Linux-savvy than newbie desktop users and be able to appreciate how much value Ubuntu brings them, wouldn't it make sense to show this screen there as well?
"Over the most recent 12-month period, Ubuntu accounted for 1.1 billion hits to Wikimedia, with the next-most popular Linux desktop distribution—Red Hat's Fedora—accounting for 36.7 million."
If I were interested in using an X based Unix, I'd probably do this and donate a few bucks. I like what Shuttleworth is doing, even as I don't want to use a Linux distro.
If you're interested in an X-based Unix, Ubuntu probably isn't the right thing to look at in the future, since I hear Wayland is supposed to be here Real Soon Now.
I guess I was sort of trying to draw the distinction between OS X and anything else. Would've been faster to just say that. The less X in my life the happier I am.
Use Ubuntu and want to give some money for it? Great. Donate. Now there is a way where previously there was none.
Use Ubuntu and don't want to give money? Great. Don't donate.
Don't use Ubuntu? Carry on.