unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martin Owens <doctormo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2010-06-05 at 11:37 +0800, Sam Spilsbury wrote:
> Donations from a central point are a bad idea, because if you make it
> easy for developers to earn money from a project, then it creates an
> onus on the developers to do more than they might already be doing. I
> have observed this a lot, where people seem to equivocate "donation"
> with the actual "paying for" something. This means that developers
> have to give an unfair priority to the people who donated interests
> rather than their own. 

That's why using the word 'donations' is confusing and I think damaging
to proper FOSS economics. This isn't a charity, this isn't goodness of
our hearts, bless our little cotton socks for they do such good for the
world. This is developers making things for themselves or who ever pay
them.

I'll give you an example, I develop ground control, no one pays me so
all my work is what I want to work on and I don't really have to listen
to anyone's needs except my own goals.

On the other hand if a set of people were giving me money then I'd
obviously be on the hook for delivering whatever I promised to do. If I
didn't promise anything and I used language like 'donations' then I've
pretty much damned myself to freely supporting people to a much greater
value than the donation was likely to be in all sorts of crazy ways.
It's better that the transaction is well defined than letting is be a
social charitable transaction.

I don't think users really appreciate how expensive development is, or
how cheap it gets when the costs are spread out over millions of people.
Anyway it's good to see folks considering how to get money to
developers, but I think this is far too little far too late and FOSS
development will continue to be an economic muddle until some
organisation stands up and sets up and makes it culturally acceptable to
pay for Free Software.

This year we have according to figures 12 million Ubuntu users, I doubt
very much that Canonical has gotten even £1 from each user, which is a
shame as that'd be very useful in speeding up development. Still at
least Dell pre-installation users pay their fair share and that's a
start to go through OEMs.

Martin,