Didn't Canonical try this with the Ubuntu Software Center and it completely failed? The top selling app in 2012 made $400 in one month. That's not bad for a side project, but you can't build a business on it.
The real elephant in the room is that a lot of people use Linux because they don't like paying for software, and like using other people's labor for free. The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself. This is why funding its projects is essentially charity when they're not valuable to a large corporation selling proprietary software.
I’d say it’s even worse than that. I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users. Therefore, my money goes to smaller projects without many (any?) full time developers.
>I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users.
It's almost certainly profit. They have a sizable user base but not a lot of good ways of getting money out of them. I would say it's a direct example of the major unsolved problem I was talking about. This is not to condone what they did, as I found the Ubuntu advertisements particularly egregious.
I'd be happy to push work to pay for a supported Linux distro, and I have had some success before in pushing companies to choose supported open source options.
I was in fact hoping that Ubuntu would be that distro a number of years ago until they pivoted away from easy, nice, clean, just works towards halfway bad copy of OS X.
Now another frustrating thing about this is that once many open source projects get to taste the sweet juice of cashflow it seems many will immediately abandon all the ideas that got me to desperately want to suppprt them and become just as hard to work with as their commercial counterparts.
That I think is almost entirely false. People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer). People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
I have been using Linux for 10 years or so and a lot of my friends/colleagues use Linux and we use Linux because software for which we are paid to work - works best on Linux. I don't think beyond college students, professional programmers using Linux mind paying for software (I pay for several!). Most of us know - there are warts and all but I have also used Mac for 5 years and my wife uses Mac for her work and it does not look like fun wresting with brew everyday.
The problem isn't that people aren't willing to pay for software - IMO the problem is, Linux is really difficult to support, because of Linux Desktop being a continuous moving target. So, application development for Linux is hard because the base is continuously changing but no company has managed to invest enough money/resources to make the base stable. And given small Linux marketshare, resources required to make a stable base is astronomical (Like google did with Android).
So, It is a chicken and egg problem. Linux can't attract large install base without a wide variety of application software, but companies who have tried supporting Linux application development have burnt themselves in past (and why bother given small Linux install base) and hence nobody has incentive to make that solid base.
>People don't use Linux because it is free (as in beer).
Plenty of Linux users I know do.
>People for whom cost is the primary concern can pirate Windows, buy cheap versions from online stores or install a legitimate version of Windows and never activate it(Microsoft makes it really easy these days). Heck already probably millions of people are using one of these options rather than installing Linux.
Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If people are willing to pay money for Linux, how come companies trying to support it haven't been successful? Would you pay $150 for a copy of a Linux distro? $200? How many of your Linux-using friends would? Would you be willing to do that every three years, like Windows?
The attitude I encounter frequently among Linux users is not just that they wouldn't pay but that they don't think money is a solution to the problems Linux has. So far, the most critical Linux development has been subsidized by proprietary software companies who use it for their infrastructure. Nobody's interested in supporting it for money because nobody wants to pay for it. The whole reason it's popular is because you don't have to. Linux would be nothing today if Linus had charged for it. There's no chicken and egg problem here. The egg is a community which doesn't value software in material terms.
> Not if they're programmers and prefer Unix. My experience with Linux users is different than yours. Yes, many of them end up caring about free software. Quite a few also have the "why pay for anything" attitude and pirate all their media, even when they could afford it. Sometimes these groups overlap. I don't think there's one single reason people come to Linux.
If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop? The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Currently libinput is maintained by one man mostly and I have a suspicion that Mirosoft has a small team for input devices. Take X11 vs Wayland for example. What would this new distro target? If it targets wayland - users will complain about nvidia GPU support, if it targets X11 - users will complain about fractional scaling/tearing. These are hard engineering problems which require working with partner drivers and long term commitment. I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
>If every one of those programmers paid $150 for their copy of Linux Desktop - do you think it would enough to fund a Company that could build/maintain a rock-solid-stable-base Linux Desktop?
It wouldn't be a bad place to start.
>The problem is that developing/supporting an OS requires enormous engineering resources and you magically don't require less resources just because your install base is small.
Well, you have to narrow the hardware you support. That's the main thing that makes Linux on the desktop suck. Only Microsoft has succeeded in writing a highly compatible operating system, as you mention with a lot of resources. But there isn't the will for this, because people want Linux to run on everything. In this area, System76 are probably doing the best. But their hardware is not very good.
>I personally think that - many companies have realized there is no money to be made in supporting desktop Linux(i.e desktop itself, not a cross-platform application running on top of it), even if every one of those users paid the one time fee.
The point is that the fee is off the table because nobody would pay it. That's all I'm saying. Your argument is a non-sequitur. You say these engineering problems require hard work, and that there's not enough money in it even if everyone paid the fee. In that case, one would need to raise the fee until it can pay for the development that needs to be done.
But the market would not bear it. It already will not bear a standard operating system price.
> The free software movement has completely failed at providing a business model for itself.
Wouldn't you say the Freemium model is a successful business model for many? Or there are free software but we can do extra for you like Automatic/Wordfence etc. Ad driven 'free' software is quite common place. Also 'goodwill' supported.
Not saying its not challenging for many free software services but there are business models around 'free'.
I didn't go into the details but ads/data are a funding mechanism. It's a funding method where you pay with intangibles, and is successful because ads/data are implicitly available on literally every platform out there and is so convenient it requires literally zero clicks on the user's behalf to activate.
I didn't mention it because it's uhhhh, antithetical to Free Software. Let me explain that:
Free Software says "put ultimate power in the users' hands, so that they can call the shots" - this is why they commonly use the GPL (sorry if obvious). Ads/tracking puts the devs at the mercy of the third parties who are paying their bills, despite said third parties not giving a shit about the quality of the software. It's why ads are so often unoptimized.
A more minor reason is that it's situational. Anything offline basically can't do either. Anything like libpng just doesn't really make sense.
But fundamentally, the crux is that devs have to do what they're paid to do. There are exceptions, but those are only exceptions and not the rule.
i thought the business model was to sell professional support for companies, and it has worked very well so far. the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case.
> the problem is that you can't apply that business model in this case
Random thought: I wonder if the problem is personal version of "selling support" is home PC repair companies, ubuntu is trying to be MS but they should be GeekSquad or geeks4u.
ubuntu's big problem is that they try to be everything to everyone.
There's room for a phone linux, a user/corporate client linux, an enterprise linux or two. It's pretty tough for a company, even the well funded ones to do all three. MS missed phone, google missed enterprise, redhat doesn't really do phone or client (fedora I guess but it's not really a paid product). Then, you got scrappy ubuntu that's gonna reinvent phones and debian and do server support, and they are kinda just bad at all of it . . ..
I've found Ubuntu Desktop to be by far the least problematic desktop Linux distro. I was a big Fedora fan for a while but the hit in stability just wasn't worth it for me, and I liked the positivity of the Ubuntu hobbyist community, containing many people who are not primarily software engineers.
It's not bad, and it's what I'd put my grandma on. It really falls down on the job as an enterprise client, shipping old buggy software like bad insecure versions of openconnect VPN and such.
If you want to set up a browsing/email machine for something it's a great choice.
This is actually where I think ubuntu should focus, the server offering is kinda meh. The upstart and unity shit was a waste of time. Instead, they should focus all that energy on being a client OS. One that can run on grandmas old machine and one that can run in the enterprise.
I know Elementary does something similar. Every time I hear about it, they make it sound like it's successful, but I've never actually seen any numbers.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2224460/linux-users-don...