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Comment by rizumu | Hacker News Reader

In the past I thought Ubuntu's intention was to level the playing field, allowing beginners from any economic background access to the best free software. I can imagine in three years time that paid Ubuntu applications in certain fields, 3D, graphic design, etc. becoming priced above what users in developing countries can afford, even still these applications could become industry standards. This seems an unfair advantage to the first world countries who can afford to spend +10$ for an app.

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What about programmers from developing countries? Ubuntu offers everything needed to program you application and a decent living off their presumably western clients. Just a thought.

I think this could be what it's going to take for Ubuntu to gain non-developer, non-governmental traction on the desktop.

I hate to say it, but the best developer software tends to be open source and the best end-user software tends to be proprietary.

>I hate to say it, but the best developer software tends to be open source

GCC and Clang and Perl and Python and V8 are fantastic and lovely and incredibly important to everyone, but i challenge you to find me any C++ IDE with better code completion and tooling than Visual Studio.

Pretty sure I said "tends to be" and not "is always".

Yes, open source C++ IDEs remains a difficult area... I think Qt Creator is pretty nice, as it groups all kinds of useful tooling together but is very focused on Qt.

The Eclipse C++ support is also pretty good these days. But it was too long ago that I looked at Visual Studio to argue anything about being better or worse...

I would welcome Visual Studio for Ubuntu though :-)

In the past I thought Ubuntu's intention was to level the playing field, allowing beginners from any economic background access to the best free software.

This is true. The rest of your argument seems to operate on a wrong definition of what free software is: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

If the right is removed to modify and redistribute (to other distros), because of appstore lock in, then it wouldn't be free. My argument is that only the economically privleged will have access to certain software on an OS that was constructed around the intention to provide equal access to everyone.

The free software isn't going away and never will, and what we developers provide as the core system will always be free. Making it possible or easy for users to also install additional proprietary software doesn't change that.

So you are a dev right? Always wanted to ask this, what are the problems with price discrimination. As in lowering the prices if someone from developing countries is purchasing the product. I mean the tech problems.

The technical problem for price discrimination based on the user's location is that location can be faked. The social problem is that, even if you succeed, users who are paying more will feel ripped off.

I think a better approach is to allow users to pay what they want (maybe with a specified minimum). If it's pitched the right way, some users will happily pay more than you'd charge them, but you're still letting poor (or stingy) users get your software, and (as a side benefit) those users may also recommend your product to others. So the net profit could be greater than if you charged a fixed price.

You could also try selling the Latin-America version (Spanish only) cheaper than the USA-English version.

Funny you ask this, as I'm probably the only Ubuntu dev with an economics degree rather than a computer science one.

Regardless, from a technical perspective, we don't really collect enough data about users to know who would be willing to pay more, and that sort of data is a minimum requirement for price discrimination of any kind. We have some pretty firm policies about not collecting personal data unless we absolutely have to, so I don't expect this to change either.

You could make a few guesses though, and for instance charge different amounts in different currencies or countries. You could also do what traditional retailers do, and provide coupons of various sorts in particular venues. We're not technically ready for anything like that yet though.

Pragmatically, I don't think it's a rabbit hole we'd want to go down even if it were no different than what existing publishers are doing anyway.

The minimum price you can charge for your app, if you want to charge for it, is $2.99 ( http://developer.ubuntu.com/publish/ ). I wonder why.

My guess would be related to their merchant account agreement. They probably wouldn't make any money on lower transactions due to fees.

Typically, you're going to pay around 50-60 cents on a small transaction, unless you have a special arrangement with your gateway and/or merchant back (or they're micropayment-friendly). You can help that somewhat by batching, if you expect people to buy multiple items before the authorization expires, but the easiest way is to just increase the price.

IMO it contradicts their message. From wikipedia: It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu ("humanity towards others")

There is some truth in what you say, but that line of reasoning can quickly go out of hand. I mean, you could also argue that every time they increase their system requirements, they do not act out of humanity towards others.

Also, I can imagine that Canonical is looking out for more and better sources of revenue. A dead Ubuntu is of no use to anyone either.

Nod. They certainly have the right to change direction to sustain, but the purpose of their mission continues to become blurrier.

I think their mission revolves more around Bug #1 in Ubuntu: “Microsoft has a majority market share”.

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