This is astoundingly far from a disappointing story. It’s the story of people working hard to do something awesome. Failure is part of being awesome. If you never fail… you’ll never be awesome.
You don’t have investors. You don’t do advertising. You’ve carved out a living (however large) on your own and in your own way. And you’ve done so using a diverse set of strategies – with mixed levels of success.
Along the way you’ve pissed off a few people and inspired (at least) twice as many. I’ve been captivated by far more boring stories.
Right, to clarify my position from the show: a very high level overview was the transparency I had in mind; and not because I think elementary OS is doing something nefarious (I don’t), but because as I understood it the optional payment for download was a donation. In that context, something along the lines of: 75% went to pay developers, 20% went toward infrastructure and 5% was miscellaneous expenses would have been the level I was referring to.
As I said in the show, I think an Open Source project testing out different funding models is actually a very interesting story. One critical to the sustainability of Open Source, which is something I believe we all care deeply about.
I opened this story here becacuse I was hoping for some kind of tangible transparency about where all the money was going that falls down the hole of paypal → into elementary’s wallet.
What I got was an American developer rebuffing any claims that they would show a full account transaction/s from their list of their donations.
Why ? Well mostly because this isn’t the American way. I mean openness with accountability are always at odds, not together concerning money in the US. -Crumbs they have a vast financial infrastructure that supports this theory.
Why #2 ? Well, they CAN’T ! If money goes down a hole and pays for multuiple items then fractions of donations make it impossible to keep track of every donations and what proportion of it is going to servers, or dev’s or whatever … quite simply the software tracker isn’t there in the system to-do this.
As such you can only give a basic majority of where the money going … it’ll never be 100% accurate and trying to find where the donations have paid off is even more difficult to put a precise tag onto.
Dude! That was post had some seriously negative mojo, @TheGuyWhoLovesChill. Why all the hate? From that single post it seems that you have a serious beef with… PayPal, elementary, anyone in “the 1st world” and the entire USA.
Your right, your right, Lunduke, your right.
1st Rule of badvoltage = Don’t be a dick.
I signed off with dickishness, and I sincerely apologize. But what drove me to do that ?
Well I became slightly para. because this entire discussion :
(pretty much the exact accountable-type of question),
has already been approached by myself on reddit
(-excuse me if I don’t give the link; as the similarity worries me).
Basically, it was well past my bed-time, I flinched and became a dick for a day.
I have self-edited. Thank-fully. And mean no harm to the entire USA at all. and hopefully I’ve learned.
Those feelings are over now. They’ve passed. And I want to just read an honest discussion, like this is.
Out of curiosity, has anyone requested Canonical or Redhat send out a detailed report of how their income is used?
Maybe there’s a perceived difference between selling a product or service and asking for a donation to support a product or service, but as a general rule I’m thinking that dog won’t hunt.
People ask, sometimes. Canonical don’t have to say, and generally won’t; they are a private company. Red Hat are publicly traded and thus must file public financials, which they do at Red Hat Investor Relations. I don’t understand how Open SuSE’s governance works well enough to know which legal entity would be involved here and whether they’re public or not; @bryanlunduke?
So the question is: How much ElementaryOS users care about where money goes and will increasing the transparency of expenditures be followed by increase in donations?
I don’t know right answer to that one. For what it’s worth Martin Wimpress did a poll on Ubuntu MATE G+ community and it looks like there is a interest in transparency and donations did rise. Though, YMMV.
I mistrust polls on this front. If you ask the question, of course everyone will say yes. If I ask a hundred people if they want a free ice-cream, they’ll all go “mm yes please!”. But were they sitting around being annoyed that they didn’t have an ice cream before I asked? I doubt it.
Also, if you give a hundred people a free ice-cream, fifteen of them will bitch that they didn’t like it or that they prefer mint choc chip or that you’re oppressing the lactose-intolerant, and they’ll bitch a lot more loudly than the other 85 will say thank you.
FWIW, I’m a current supporter of Ubuntu MATE (both through past one-off donations and an admittedly tiny but recurrent Patreon donation). I commonly donate to open-source and freedom fostering projects, from the EFF to Mozilla, typically picking a different project monthly. I say this not to brag, but rather to establish that I am a person that commonly donates.
Not to speak for Martin, but I don’t think a driving goal behind Ubuntu MATE is to make money via software sales. That does not appear to be the case with ElementaryOS. I have no issue with anyone making money off open-source, nor do I feel that there’s a need or even a right to know where the money they make is being spent.
Donations to a non-profit should be used wisely and reported openly, IMO… but this strikes me more as payment for a product, which is an entirely different beast.
I haven’t tracked this too closely, but perhaps some of the issue could be from a fledgling outfit not being clear enough from the outset. “We’re a LLC and we’re here to make a finished product… and we’d like to be paid for it.”
Our code is available for review, scrutiny, modification, and redistribution by anyone.
I do believe that folks behind the project have their harts in the right place and I admire to those that are trying to make a new model for living out of FLOSS.
Being privileged to take Dan Ariely’s course, on behavioral economics I have (some) ideas on how people could be irrational and in regards to elementaryOS’s donate-zero-to-download I understand that you need to constantly remind people of this-system-does-not-perpetuate-on-his-own.
That being said, I do understand but do not like the current implementation. There has to be a more subtle way to achieve the goal of:
Increase the perceived value of a project. ($25-to-download-by-default)
Change the social norm of participation to majority adds whatever it have (code, art, money…) ($0-to-download)
Also, I just received an eMail from bountysource to say thatlementary OS receives $400 a month to basically code and keep the site running.
Source:
The day they get it to run with a decent software centre on a tablet is the day I’ll install it. #BuiltforTablets
The Link in the eMail was to a bountysource project called SALT. Link here.
Apparently you can get a T-shirt (upto 2XL) for $15, one off payment, if you like.
lementary OS receives $400 a month to basically code and keep the site running.