UBports Continues Plotting To Keep Ubuntu Touch Alive

[starshipeleven]

1) No, giving people money is not the same as an investments, and I can promise you no bank is going to see it that way either.

Uhm, you know right that there are high risk investments where the payback isn't guaranteed? High risk high profit.
This happens with normal people and small sums of money so that even if they lose that it's no big loss. It's akin to very small scale high risk investment with profit in kind.

2) Sure, crowdfunding is nice and can be used to get things started. But if you're not even trying to get customers, but only hoping for donations, then you don't have any hope of attracting any long-term investors.

Crowdfunding isn't "hoping for donations", please get out of your antiquated mentality.

For a successful crowdfunding you need to convince people to give you money, it's not just sitting around and waiting for money to come in like Canonical did. Again it has similarities to convincing investors, but what normal people want is usually a product, while an investor wants cash.
For bigger projects you need to put down smallish steps where at the end of each you have some product to give to your "funders", for example.

Which is why it can make sense in situations where there is 0 chance the project could make money to pay back investors.

3) Not all investors seek massive returns and thousands of billions are very long-term investments. Personally, most important investment is one I expect to hold for at least thirty years, at ~2-3% per year, while the stock is expected to only grow very slowly. That's a very safe bet. But I also have high-risk investments. It's fun, it's ideas I believe in and it might be profitable.

I already said why I doubt their project can be anywhere near profitable for third party investors. (I also made a tl;dr in the last answer of this post)

I really believe that Ubuntu Personal would've been a very viable business if they had a business model for it. It wouldn't be for everyone, but that's fine, because you don't need a large number of customers in order to be profitable. Again, it is not necessary for a business to make billions of dollars. Small economies can be good economies. Small businesses can be very good businesses.

Please explain how you can make profitable a FOSS software that can be cloned for free due to its very own license, in a end-user environment that does not need to pay for company-grade support and would NOT like being monetized ala Google Services.

And be verbose, other companies that live off Linux like RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, and other minor ones are all ears.

But one of the most important rules of business, is you must have a plan to make money. If your business plan is hoping for donations, then I don't think the banks will be very happy to help you get your family settled into a new home.

Most projects that ask for crowdfunding would get laughed out of the bank. This isn't an exception. See above for why.

If your argument is that nobody in their right minds would want to pay $10usd annually for an OS for their phone and desktop, then I wonder why you're donating.

My argument is that those that would pay for a software stack that can be easily recompiled from source for free (you'd get a free fork in like 2 days if you try) are basically the same people that would donate to the project by their own will anyway, so why trying to lock it down and shooting themselves in the foot by alienating them?

Canonical already did the same, with CLA and with Mir and so on, and you see how well it turned out.

[jo-erlend]

My argument is that those that would pay for a software stack that can be easily recompiled from source for free (you'd get a free fork in like 2 days if you try) are basically the same people that would donate to the project by their own will anyway, so why trying to lock it down and shooting themselves in the foot by alienating them?

Canonical already did the same, with CLA and with Mir and so on, and you see how well it turned out.

Maintaining a fork of an OS is quite a bit of work, so if you're _that_ desperate to save less than one dollar per month, then you're obviously not going to donate either, so the point is moot. You're entirely correct that Canonical chose to ask for donations rather than setting a price. This doesn't work, which is my point.

Red Hat, on the other hand, sets a price. Yes, you can get forks of their products, but people still pay. And why shouldn't they? They know what they're getting.

I really don't understand the concept that people must donate ahead of time, rather than pay for services rendered. Is that how your life works? You go to work every day, hoping that your employer will donate some money next month too? I don't think so. You want your paycheck, I'll wager.

I wonder if you're more willing to pay for proprietary software.