Should you pay for Elementary OS?

"We want users to understand that they’re pretty much cheating the system when they choose not to pay for software."

Trying to guilt users into paying for their OS? I'm disappointed. Just when I thought elementary OS was awesome.

[Edit] elementary has since removed that statement from their post: http://blog.elementaryos.org/post/110645528530/payments

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elementaryos/files/

Yeah. Not seeing anything here about payment required.

I wasn't in the least surprised.

There were hints that this was the long term goal -- strong enough that I specifically chose to not bother downloading one of their betas, because of it.

I wasn't sure (that they planned to make it a paid product) but that seemed the way to bet. Not that direct monetization is necessarily wrong, but the coyness about how they were promoting their beta releases rubbed me the wrong way -- not that they outright lied, but it seemed potentially deceptive... and I guess it was.

If they want people to pay for it, they need to at least put a decent default web browser on it. Midori is no Firefox.

I liked the guy who commented that he just donated $10 to Debian in their name. haha

I don't mind donating to distributions and have in fact done so for Linux Mint several times. But, when a distribution EXPECTS payment, I draw the line. One, don't volunteer to be an OS developer if you expect to be paid and two, don't expect users to pay for something that's free in the case of 700+ other distributions. Asking nicely is one thing but expecting or demanding is quite another. I think this entire fiasco was mishandled by the Elementary devs.

@ cmost:

You mean like this one?

Sounds like a rehash of the Mepis fiasco.

If they were serious about getting payment out of folks they'd pull an elive and add a step to the installer that requires a "donation", but that would require you know - actual work.

~Jeff