
Payments – Why we make you type "$0" - LukeB_UK
http://blog.elementary.io/post/110645528530/payments
======
orik
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...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150211134734/http://blog.elementaryos.org/post/110645528530/payments)

>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 Shell, because
it is just Ubuntu + Pantheon Shell.

Elementry's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel or
GNU Tools, and yet they made the argument that the end user is 'cheating the
system' when they download a prebuilt iso of a collection of free software for
free.

If Elementary wanted to take the high ground, they'd introduce a Humble Bundle
style payment system split between the various foundations they're building
off of. Maybe the defaults would look something like 30% to the Linux
Foundation, 20% to the FSF, 20% to Debian, 20% to Ubuntu, and 10% to
themselves.

~~~
rgbrenner
_Elementry 's Dev team doesn't pay for Ubuntu, they don't pay for the Kernel
or GNU Tools_

This attitude is why we don't see Linux startups -- just volunteer efforts,
run on peoples spare time that they eventually get burnt out on and give up.

They are asking for $10. They aren't asking for a huge sum of money. $10 could
be a very reasonable amount of money for the effort they've put into it.

Yes, it's built on free software... but when I (and many other people too)
build their start up on free software and charge money.. we don't ask how much
of that is going to Nginx, Linux, etc... we say, they're charging for the
time/effort required to build that service.

And just like how many startups would be forced to charge higher prices if
they had to redevelop nginx, etc... elementaryOS wouldn't be $10 if they had
to duplicate all of that work.

~~~
adekok
> They are asking for $10. They aren't asking for a huge sum of money. $10
> could be a very reasonable amount of money for the effort they've put into
> it.

It's a matter of marketing. Everyone knows it's based on Ubuntu, so they feel
cheated when they're asked to pay for a free OS.

A marketing solution is to sell it as:

* base system $0 - VM with free download, no whines about "cheating". And the base VM gets you an Ubuntu image which boots to a shell prompt.

* Elementary additions: $$. The base system plus our less-filling, weight-loss inducing proprietary magic!

People are happy to pay money for linux application. Not many people, and for
not a lot of money. But people do pay.

Having happy paying customers is a _lot_ better than calling your potential
customer base "cheaters". That's just stupid .

~~~
SunShiranui
Surely one can already download the "base system" from the Ubuntu website?

~~~
adekok
That's not the point.

The point is right now, they are asking people to pay for a free version of
Ubuntu. This annoys people.

They should change their pricing model to make it clear that the base OS is
free. And that their additions are a product which should be paid for.

------
rlpb
It troubles me when I see statements like "an entire operating system that has
taken years of development and refinement" and "However, developing software
has a huge cost", but there's no mention of the money they're collecting going
to the developers of Ubuntu, Debian and upstreams that surely together
comprise the majority of the work that they're referring to.

Basing their wording on the huge development cost of the entire work, rather
than what they're adding, seems misleading to me since what they're adding is
a tiny proportion of the entire cost they're referring to; yet they seem to
want to take the money as justified by the entire cost.

That's not to say that Elementary OS developers aren't adding value. Clearly
they are if users are downloading from them, and it's fine to ask users to pay
for that.

~~~
colechristensen
Consider also, quite importantly, that a large volume of the work done on any
Linux-based operating system is and has been done entirely without money
changing hands.

~~~
pjmlp
Only when one forgets that most of those developers:

\- were payed to work on GNU/Linux by their employers

\- had a different source of income

\- were students with their parents paying for their bills

\- were building a portfolio for a job change

So money did change hands, even if indirectly.

~~~
zxcvcxz
You're being pedantic. The users point is that neither the Linux foundation,
Linux Users, or Linus Torvalds pays people to contribute to the kernel.

While one company may pay its employees to write code for the Linux kernel,
that company is still writing the code and contributing it to Linux for free.

~~~
pjmlp
The employees salary is not free, or are you suggesting those employees don't
enter the hours into the companies accounting system?

------
markild
Interesting read. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but this is the first
I've heard about elementary.

Though, not directly related to their payment model, I wish they would more
clearly state that they're a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. I couldn't
"quickly" find any info on it anywhere on their site, so I had to find out
from Wikipedia. I guess this has something to do with their target audience,
and the way the sell this as an alternative to Windows or OS X.

Somewhat related to their payment model, I would very much like to see them
contribute some of what they're making back to Ubuntu/Debian, if they don't
already.

~~~
njloof
It's also unclear from their homepage why I would want yet another OS/UI
combo. What are the advantages? Does it run any apps? I'm definitely not
paying $10 sight unseen. Maybe a 30-day trial would be a better model before
asking for payment.

~~~
narrowrail
Why would they need to offer a trial? Just type in 0$ and download or just
download the torrent directly (they default to a torrent anyway, at least when
choosing 0$).

~~~
lukaslalinsky
Because it's not clear that you can actually type in $0 and if you do you are
a "cheater". Right know it asks for money, before you even see what it is and
what it does.

------
jasonkester
This is completely baffling. Just remove the option to download your thing for
free.

You know it has value. You just spent a thousand words explaining why you
think people should pay money for your thing. There's an easy way to get them
to do that: _Charge money for your thing_.

No need to guilt anybody. No need to apologize. You built an entire _operating
system_. Those cost money. Give your users the option of paying you, not using
your thing, or (if you absolutely can't detach yourself from this irrational
need to give your work away for free) building it from source.

~~~
detaro
Removing the option to download GPL software for free seems like a pointless
exercise...

Also: they build a set of desktop apps for Ubuntu and did some other polishing
work. Not to say that isn't hard and important work, but it also isn't
"building an entire operating system".

~~~
derefr
I don't see why. The GPL requires that you provide the _source_ for free. It
says nothing about providing the binaries for free. The entire job of a distro
is packaging and ease-of-configuration-management. If you do that part
yourself to spite them, you're removing the entirety of the advantage you were
getting by using their distro in the first place. The incentives work out.

~~~
Nursie
The GPL requires you to give source to anyone you gave binaries to, not
publish the source to the world.

But the important part is that _everyone you gave any source or binaries to
has the right of redistribution_

~~~
anon3_
That's the fallacy of the GPL. It's less about privacy (YOU Vs big brother)
and more about people feeling _entitled_ to free software. All the time.

And now it's too far - you're trying to bankrupt people who aren't big
corporations in big suits - but people who felt humble, artistic passion. You
think you can act like a mob to crush their dream and gut it out.

This is another example of people swarming like locusts because they fail to
understand that other people have mortgages to pay too.

Taken further, the license that Linux falls under makes like all the more
miserable for providing your own value and creativity. GPL is truly a
minefield for commerce.

~~~
Redoubts
They could have worked on a BSD. This strategy has worked well in the past...

~~~
derefr
I'm honestly surprised that nobody is trying to out-OSX OSX as a
software/services play. It seems like such an easy pitch.

~~~
quesera
That's an interesting idea, but I would not call it easy.

------
thewhitetulip
This has already been discussed on HN before.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029995)

~~~
staz
Yes this is a 3 months old blog post, don't know why it's getting frontpaged
again

~~~
misframer
It's quite normal for submissions to be reposted and make it to the front page
again.

~~~
thewhitetulip
Yes, it can come on the front page: what worried me the most was that people
were commenting on it as if it is for the first time it has arrived on HN!
Time travel!

------
nubela
Why don't you include the payment WITHIN the system? I wouldn't pay before I
try eOS, it is only if I stick and use it, will I consider paying.

~~~
toyg
I'd go further and say that opensource distributions should _all_ have a
standard customizable package that will "nag" users after a certain amount of
hours from first boot. The package could spring a pop-up if X is running, or
send an email to root@ (or whatever the "admin" user is). If done well, I bet
a lot of users wouldn't mind dropping $5 or $10 -- probably more than you get
by doing the occasional donation drive.

In fact, some good soul could get together the main actors (Debian, Ubuntu,
Arch) and set up a shared infrastructure that will provide a common flow for
this revenue stream (payment UI, merchant accounts etc), sharing fixed costs.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
toyg
_> 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 time limit is reached. Regardless of nagging, users were
supposed to pay for Winzip after a certain date from installation. This is why
most people with advanced zipping requirements switched, once 7Zip became
robust enough. (Regular Joes just stopped using either once Windows got good
enough at dealing with zipped files.)

 _> You want me to pay you? Say it up-front. _

Sorry, I personally have the opposite attitude. 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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _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.

------
b3lvedere
Hey, it's your OS. Do whatever you want with it as long as you respect the
GPL. You do not need to explain that.

I've tried Elementary a bit. Didn't like it. Sorry.

------
realusername
It would be interesting to see if the new dialog box is improving the number
of users paying for the software, but I guess they are waiting for more data
to see that. Appart for that, I have absolutely no problem paying for
Elementary, in my opinion is the best Linux distribution and by far.
Everything is really polished and well done.

~~~
Mikeb85
> Everything is really polished and well done.

I'm using Elementary OS right now. It's pretty, but it's really no more
polished than Ubuntu. In fact, it just mostly uses the same Ubuntu
repositories. That's not a bad thing, but it's worth keeping in mind that
Elementary OS is as good as it is because it's building on Ubuntu.

~~~
neuropie
I wonder how Canonical feel about Elementary making money off an operating
system that receives updates from archive.ubuntu.com

~~~
NhanH
It really doesn't matter how they feel though.

~~~
neuropie
It all seems a bit similar to Red Star OS.

------
jitix
It's not bad that they are asking for money. Although the current norm is to
give away the binaries for free, I think they can and should charge for the
service they are providing by building the binaries and making them available
for download. Especially since it's a very polished distro. But the wording on
the blog post appears a little arrogant since it is not an entire OS built
from scratch.

------
nathanb
I think there are some interesting dynamics at play here....

The post (even with the edits to remove unfortunate phrasing) seems really
aggrieved at the community's expectation that open source projects are by
definition free as in beer. Reading the comments on that article, it does seem
true that many folks seem to feel entitled to a free copy of this software.

This is part of the culture and the ecosystem, though. It doesn't justify
being an entitled jerk, but if you're going to operate in a particular space,
you have to understand the culture behind that space.

(And for those on HN stating "this is why you don't see entrepreneurial
activity in the Linux ecosystem"...well, how much entrepreneurial activity are
you seeing in the Windows ecosystem these days? I think the Linux attitude may
foster rather than hamper long-term innovation, because even when the money
moves elsewhere there's still that core group of people working on projects
for love and passion rather than for money.)

------
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.

~~~
zxcvcxz
>Most kernel contributors are paid to work on the kernel.

Not by the Linux Foundation or Linux users. They're paid by third parties.

It's like MS pays it's employees to work on Linux but MS is still doing it for
free.

------
embik
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.

~~~
brusch64
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 complicated and ruined, because they got money and started
"distributing" wealth which left some of the people disgruntled (basically
most of the bands who got successful have stories like that).

~~~
embik
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](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.

~~~
brusch64
Ok thank you for making this clear. Doing it with bug bounties makes sense to
me.

------
ifdefdebug
2,000,000 * (100 - 99.875) / 100 * (10 + 1) / 2 = 13750 They piss everybody
off for literally nothing.

------
ubertaco
Before they published this blog post, I was mildly annoyed at having to type
"$0" to download Elementary, but otherwise I dug their goal of making a clean
and simple-to-use desktop environment.

Then they published this post -- and mind you, this is not the original
version of this post (the original was worse).

With statements like:

>We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when
they choose not to pay for software.

...and...

>we feel that an entire operating system that has taken years of development
and refinement is worth some money.

...when all they've really done is:

* Build a stripped-down Gnome-family derivative Desktop Environment

* Build a custom-skinned wrapper around GTK that fits _their_ custom DE (and expect app devs to fall in line with it)

* Write a few super-primitive apps in it (a Rhythmbox fork, a notepad clone, and a basic email client)

is just a -bit- overstating things, to say nothing of the difference between a
desktop environment and "an entire operating system".

Then they say:

> Most of the open source world is similar; Inkscape and GIMP only get money
> for development if users decide to give it to them.

without the slightest ounce of self-awareness to realize that neither of those
projects make conscious design decisions to trick users into thinking they
have to _buy_ them. If I see a $____ box, my first assumption is that typing
"0" has the same effect as typing "-1" or "aaaa": a validation error. It's a
very close sibling of the "Sneak Into Basket"[1] UI "dark pattern".

These are the moves that turned me from a fan/advocate of elementary to a
critic: not that their software was poor quality (the parts they had actually
built were, for the most part, roughly as nice a UI as most other Ubuntu
derivatives had in my opinion), but that their philosophy and attitude made
them the kind of people I want to actively avoid promoting.

[1] [http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-
basket/](http://darkpatterns.org/sneak-into-basket/)

------
joosters
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)

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

~~~
diggan
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.

------
mirimir
If they accepted Bitcoins, I would have paid some USD. But mirimir has no
credit cards.

~~~
markild
They do, though...

~~~
mirimir
You're right! I must have missed it.

------
ed0wolf
>Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right.

Huh. That doesn't make sense.

~~~
mmmmmbop
Guess it is meant to say write. I cringed reading that.

