As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why.

If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.

edit: typo

>As an OSS contributor, I _do_ begrudge him for it - and this is why. If you were to email Elementary and ask for support with a non-working 'sg' kernel module, I would be highly surprised if they offered you any support. More likely, they would tell you to contact one of the authors, who did not receive one dime for our work. He takes your money, and shirks off supporting you to people that _didn't_ take your money.

By voluntarily contributing to an OSS-licensed project, you don't have the moral right to begrudge him for it. What they are doing is completely permitted by the license; RMS has spelled it out over and over. So, no sympathy from me.

That's kinda the point. He pushes for donations, but doesn't offer support. It's not illegal for him to not offer support and it's not illegal for me to not pay him.

I would prefer to pay a reasonable subscription fee with a support contract which is also not illegal, but benefits all parties.

Why are you only willing to pay for support, but not actual contributions?

I do make contributions to some projects (can't support them all), but if the project is being too pushy, they can count me out. The idea that I can get support in return is just a nicer model of exchange. There's a good chance that I won't even use that support, but it's nice to know that my contributions have a direct impact on how usable the project is for my needs.

Oh, I don't begrudge him either.

I run a small software company myself. We're selling our software on the internet. But our website focuses on getting people to download the free trial first. The "asking for money" is then done once the trial period ends.

It's already hard to get people to download your stuff for free. With obviously visible download buttons.

If we did what Elementary is doing we would be closing our shop rather soon.

As far as I know the GPL does not allow trial periods and asking for money later on, but feel free to correct me. That's why elementary cannot do such a thing.

GPL doesn't prohibit payment. It just implicitly undercuts payment because the first to pay can redistribute for less or nothing.

Yet some projects still squeak out some money: Synergy, DOSBox Turbo, etc.

GPL just requires source to be available to anyone who receives the binary. It has to be available on request. You can ask them to pay for the cost of postage to ship it to them.

Hell, you can ask them to pay anything, like RedHat does, regardless of costs. It's perfectly legal and GPL-compliant. You just have to provide sources.

No, I didn't mean a trial version. I just suggested they should ask for a donation once people actually had the chance to find out if they'd consider donating worth it.

The GPL and payment are orthogonal. They could GPL a piece of software that stops working after 30 days if you don't pay. You decide if to compile out the code that checks for the payment (and possibly distribute your version) or pay them those money.

If it stops working it violates the GPL:

Freedom 0: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."

You have the code, so you can run it as you wish.

Does this line make a program un-GPL?

    exit(0) if Time.now > Time.new(2016,11,15,0,0,0)

yes, because you can start it again. If it destroys itself it is un-GPL

If Elementary wants to alter some program to add a time bomb, the GPL cannot stop them. The GPL only ensures that the user can take the time bomb out (either by themselves or by following instructions on the internet, or by hiring somebody to do it).

No. Gpl has no such thing. But you'll have to provide the source code with your software, so I'll just modify the source to give myself infinite trial.

_that's why it won't work_

It'll work, it just won't get quite as many conversions as it might otherwise. The same principle applies to closed-source software, after all: you have to provide the binary, so I'll just modify the binary to give myself an infinite trial. This is entirely doable, but enough people still pay to make it a viable business in many cases.

The number of people that would bother to do that is relatively small. If it's a good product, and reasonably priced, people would much rather just pay to have it. (See music streaming.)

In the previous design of the website, there was a small "...or download for free" button tucked away below the payment options. IIRC that meant that the number of users who payed for the OS was something below 1%. Now, after that switch, it's still rather low, but combining with the amount of money they get from other places (like Patreon[0]) it's enough to have two (again, IIRC) full time developers and one part time developer.

From what I can remember, there was never a time where they disallowed a way of downloading the OS for free, they just made it more difficult to figure out over time.

[0] https://www.patreon.com/elementary

The argument is that the potential user needs to be aware of his action when he's entering in "0". Otherwise, it's just automatic - you don't even think about it.

But I think it's counterproductive, because it looks adversarial. Apparently the best way to get the donation is to bring up the payment screen after the download has happened. This is because risk-averse buyers can first try the product and then feel less pressured to decide how much it's worth:

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53376/

It's kind of difficult to do that when you are talking about the OS, isn't it?

First of all, it's a rather large download, so you're probably going to close the website as soon as you click on the download button. Second of all, to consume the product in this case, you have to install it. And yet again, after you do so, if you get greeted with the "donate" window right away, you're going to dismiss it because you still haven't tested out the product.

So, what you need is a timer, something that says like "after 30 minutes (or an hour, or two hours) of usage, display the window", but that would require the OS to make calls to external servers without the user consent, and, because we are talking about a Linux-based operating system, people would be complaining that this is a a privacy violation.

> It's kind of difficult to do that when you are talking about the OS, isn't it?

Not necessarily. It's not like you expect the buyer to do a careful analysis of what it's worth before they pay. You can usually decide this sort of thing based on very quick impressions. Also, there's the aspect of it just seeming nicer to ask after the download has happened. Then it's clear that you already have the product, now it's up to you to decide what to pay for it, if anything at all. Here people have been tricked into thinking they had to pay and begrudge the author.

It does seem nicer to ask after, but then again, 99% of us simply close the tab after the download starts. We just do it automatically.

> 99% of us simply close the tab after the download starts.

Really? On most sites that I visit, I 'Save As' every link that I care to download, so that there is no separate tab to close. (But maybe you were referring only to this specific site.) Maybe the solution is just to make sure that there's more of interest on your download page than just the download button?

It's a tradeoff between getting more users and getting more money, which I'm sure he knows. He's chosen to be more towards the "money" end of the scale, which is fair enough.

Incidentally, it's the same tradeoff Apple may have made.

Stare into the abyss etc.

Isn't this a dark pattern though?

No, it's not. It says "pay what you want" and you can literally pay what you want (including nothing).

Well, I think it is.

If I pay nothing, I don't pay.

I don't say "I paid zero." or "I paid nothing" unless someone asks the specific question "How much did you pay for that?"

It's obviously a way to nudge people into paying something.

edit: I made an aside about the use of the word 'donation' by cannabis collectives in the U.S. to denote 'payment' (as a way to operate as non-profits and avoid federal problems) as a reference to similarly weak wording used in a nefarious way, but I thought the relationship to the pattern here was weak, so I removed it.

When I first heard about zero-Ohm resistors I thought it was hilarious.

They do serve a purpose though.

So they should disable writing "0" in the input box and require that you enter "nothing"?

I'm very curious to try it out, and came to comments in hopes of seeing some comments about what it's like. Instead there's a bunch of comments about the pricing situation. So it's definitely affected my chance of giving it a shot.

I'm using it and it's pretty good. I don't really agree with the scheme of 1. Tricking you into paying something. 2. Feeling guilty for entering $0...but the ui is not bad at all imho.

Considering how Elementary is a skin on top of Ubuntu with some shiny icons and animations...

No thank you, I'd rather use Mint or Ubuntu if I want an easy distro.

It is progressively becoming quite more than a simple skin. They do have their own window manager and a quite comprehensive set of applications with simplified interfaces and consistent UI. To me it seems like a worthy goal, however it seems to create a separation between the typical Linux user/developer and their potential targeted users.

Not really. I developed on elementary quite a lot. I find its ease of getting around quite easy. Your text editor / IDE is at the front and everything else is completely tucked away + you can control basic things about your OS like music / notifications etc. without having to focus on some other app to make a change. And it's pretty lightweight.

Comparing that to GNOME, where everything is so damn big that it wastes half of my screen and KDE where the default apps are usually bloated and confusing and can do way too many things, I call Pantheon as a win for the developers.

EDIT: Also, one neat trick that I've never seen any other terminal emulator doing other than Pantheon Terminal, is that you get a desktop notification every time you're not focused on the terminal when it finishes its job. For example, let's say I do something like "sudo apt install netbeans". Since the download is large, I'm going to focus on something else in the meantime and I'll get a desktop notification when the installation is finished.

That is quite neat. Sometimes I have been adding `&& terminal-notifier -message "done"` to my scripts in macOS terminal/iterm.

Konsole does it too, just not by default.

Gnome does that nowadays too. Unfortunately not so useful for remote shells or tmux

elementary OS has evolved a lot from just a simple skin on top of Ubuntu. You can see here [1] all the projects which are maintained by the team.

[1] https://launchpad.net/elementary