> 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 communities.
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.
I don't think it's wrong to "ask" for money, but it does seem wrong to state that paying $0 is "cheating the system". The implication is that if you choose to pay $0, you're doing something devious or unethical.
> 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.
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.
> I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss .. contribution
I am not dismissing their work, I just find the attitude a little snobbish. Just like if you gift-wrap something and you take credit for everything that's inside. The attitude is just wrong.
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.
It's not the first, yes, but in my opinion they're the best at it. Either way, it doesn't hurt having more than one organization working on good Linux UX.
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.
That's unnecessarily harsh. On one hand HN has articles of people jumping off the 9-to-5 rut to pursue something they are passionate about full-time while on the other we have people accusing Daniel of the same choice.
Because saying that people who use FOSS software without paying are "cheating the system" is not harsh? You know, you often get the reaction that you deserve.
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 communities.