[MengYuanLong]

W1ntermute is decrying the fact that the Ubuntu team is in a position where they feel it is necessary to rely on selling access to their userbase.

It seems the most valued contribution skilled peoples can make to Ubuntu is in code and time. Even non-technical users can contribute valuable assets to the project. If your company has spare hardware, that is also useful to the SPI.

However, if you lack those resources, donations are openly accepted by both Ubuntu[1] and Debian[2].

[1]http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate [2]http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/

Taking fifteen minutes, considering the value added by Ubuntu and choosing an appropriate amount to donate is not "a high mental cost". Nor is writing a check or completing the electronic ClickPledge checkout form.

Further, the argument that if Ubuntu had more money it would undermine their organization's mission and cause endless infighting is baseless. Would you make the same argument about the Wikimedia foundation or EFF?

[saurik]

First off, the argument I was trying to make with regards to donations being "hard" is that it turns off a lot of people. I, personally, have made numerous donations to different organizations for the things they provide me.

I have donated to non-profit organizations like the EFF and contributed money to everything from conferences to individuals who are simply "making a giant dent in an important problem but are sadly too busy to dedicate all of their time to it".

However, I am fairly confident that I am rare. I thereby understand that me giving $10,000 to Ubuntu, in the grand scheme of things, is meaningless in comparison to a reality where every serious user of Ubuntu was paying them $200.

I thereby contend that having a system of open-ended donations that requires physical mail with checks or money orders is a problem. You can tell me I'm not contributing enough, but that is both insulting to me and completely misses the point.

Note: at this point, you could simply have said "you misread that page, the Click & Pledge system lower down actually allows you to donate without physical anything", but you didn't quite; my response would have been: "I seriously did not notice that, and I'm sorry".

That said, I am not certain how much that changes the overall point: that entire page seems accidentally designed to make people consider donating to Debian both difficult and even "scary": as someone who has to do a lot of writing for random people who may not speak English very well to read, a lot of people are going to think that paragraph about identity theft applies to their online transaction, and not to the Debian Foundation posting accounts to wire.

Secondly, I did not make the argument at the end: I accepted that I could appreciate other people making that argument. Instead, I made the longer argument through the previous set of paragraphs that Ubuntu should actively charge for things.

Your last paragraph and its closing question is thereby highly confusing, and makes me question both whether you read my comment, and whether I should bother responding to yours. That said, I will now put on the hat of the people I overall disagree with and attempt to answer your question.

I, personally, am involved in what I, as well as many, consider more of a "movement" than a product: a specific form of hacking known as "jailbreaking" mobile devices, and in particular the iPhone (although I also do Android work).

In this capacity, I have seen many different people who have myriad opinions on what happens when you inject the concerns of managing money into a decentralized system, and I have seen first hand what happens "on the inside".

For one, you immediately get concerns about who is contributing what to the project, and thereby how the money should be allocated. As the contributions are decentralized, it is not clear that any one person or even one group of people should "own allocation".

In the case of Ubuntu, I imagine that even getting donations is tense. It is my understanding that many of the people working on Debian or with past ties to Debian feel that the Ubuntu project's primary purpose is to leach off their effort.

Meanwhile, I contend that things can get even worse if you start charging. Of course, as I believe that charging is the right course of action, I actually do charge for things personally, so I can talk about how people react to these kinds of charges.

The result is that a lot of people now believe you are "rolling in the money", when in fact you are a community project that is reinvesting the money you receive in improved output by hiring people and donating the rest.

This is difficult for end users to contemplate, however, as all they see is that they are having to pay $200 for an operating system distributed via a medium with a near-$0 marginal production cost (downloadable/copyable files).

However, again, I think that this entire diversion is weird, because I spent an entire post attempting to argue that Ubuntu should charge for things, linking to an argument made by other people, and attempting to state that donations might not be enough.

Thereby, my arguments for why Ubuntu should not accept or even demand money might not be very good: if you are seriously attempting to ask that question, you should ask it to someone who is actually on that side of the argument.