33 comments

1. Thanks for everything, don’t worry about the stats it will get better again, I know

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2. Change Roguebodycrafts to Nick Djinn? Or better yet, add it in front or after it?

   Ill try to donate something every release.

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3. we wait for the new theme>
   will love the monocrome thingy

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4. Well, financial problem is always a big issue for a software project. I am not rich enough to donate. What I can do is to make more of my friends know and start using Linux Mint. As more people are using it, Mint is gonna gain a higher influence among all Linux distros. Hopefully that will essentially help with the financial issues.

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5. Hi,

   I just tried LMDE and all I can say is WOW!!!

   A Debian distro that works better than Ubuntu! just WOW!!!

   Please keep that route, all that makes ubuntu good it’s just that it mostly works out of the box, and the huge amount of software in user PPA’s that make one’s linux life less painful and more enjoyable, but that’s it, anything else: themes, button changes and silly interface changes are just annoyances.

   LMDE is the way forward! And with rolling power!!!

   LMDE on my machines runs faster and hassle free with LMDE than Ubuntu 9.10/10.04/10.10.

   Having a distro as “desktop ready” as ubuntu but not being ubuntu is awsome!

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6. I will donate! This was very little money to a great project, and a little bit sad. Mint deserves much more money and attention. Linux distros: unite! Mint is on track, so keep on 🙂

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7. Clem, I just sent you my contribution, thank you very much for everything. Hope Oct. stats improves to the level you guys deserve.

   Linux Mint really rocks!!!

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8. This economy has hurt many open source projects this year. It has been especially tough personally for the last 3 years! However, upon reading this blog post, I made a first time donation to keep Linux Mint strong and innovating. I intend to continue donating every month because I know just how important a steady source of income is to Linux Mint.

   P.S. I just love LMDE!

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9. I wish I could donate, but I will keep talking about LMDE for my friends. This is just an incredible idea. Good luck!

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10. I’ve increased my sponsorship amount 🙂

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11. Crew men has really really Linux Mint worked hard and whatever may be should be appreciated and supported. Why don’t these guys go a little commercial??

    Something like shipping Linux Mint and making a reasonable price just for shipping it or charges for distribution that may vary according to nation. because for a home desktop Linux Mint had been best choice for ever.

    A little commercialisation won’t effect. or even shipping or important softwares in sort of DVD can be charged.

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12. after reading this post and some other reason, I have made a little sponsoring subscription, I hope it will help a little. If I have more regular financial possibility’s, I will raise the amount. I hope that this Project keep alive. But with every new release Mint became more popular, and perhaps there are more sponsors….

    Whit the release of Mint 10 I will re-use Mint as main OS 🙂 (hope all my new hardware will work with it…)

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13. Mint would be served well by incorporating the strengths of DreamLinux, Knoppix, and CAOS linux, in my opinion.

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14. Got an old Dell Inspiron 6000.The 1 sans the ATI x300 graphics card so it’s this crap Intel 915 coupled with just 512Mb RAM.Got really tired of Win 7’s laggard theatrics so decided to give Mint 9 LXDE a go.unetbooted a USB flash stick and everything else were smooth as butter right till I had to fiddle with Samba since the other 3 PCs are what else still on Win 7 and needed to get this “new” linux rig on the team.It’s not a main rig for sure but I don’t like to waste stuff.

    While it’s daunting enough to go through the sudo commands then got a bit aggravated when I found out that I could have just added the Samba GUI via the Software Manager,to my horror I spent nearly all night just to discover that some more Win 7 side quirks needed to be tweaked on top off smbadduser episodes that I had to go through.Suffice to say I’m just not ready to sacrifice file sharing just yet to fly this linux rig solo so I gave up.

    But my point is..yeah..Linux Mint IT IS from install to get go and yes probably those important yet not entirely Mint’s fault that is Samba seriously needs to be fixed for a Windows switcher like me.

    And then I discovered through my hours upon hours of trying to learn about packages;how many?all necessary or not?what to keep and which to junk?

    So it all boils down to this Ubuntu dependency it seems..hmm.

    I keep up with these monthly stat posts as this site is on top heap of my bookmarks on both of my Firefox and Opera.So it sobered me up that probably you guys deserve x10 of what you get on average every month.Then maybe..just maybe…

    …I’ll get this wish of mine;LMDE LXDE Edition (lol that’s a mouthful ;p) with that same Windows installer front and somehow some way this time if Samba can step up the game as well.

    Pooling my resources to be a steady donator so keep up the excellent work Linux Mint team!

    Posted from Malaysia.

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15. @11
    “Why don’t these guys go a little commercial?”

    as of writing, you can purchase Mint CD/DVD’s and flash-sticks from:

    http://on-disk.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=70

    it is important to recognize that mint and other linux projects get the essential support to develop through donations, sponsors and the sale of merchandise and service. You can pay for the distribution but you cannot really “go commercial” and put a fixed price on the software included within which is inherently open-source and free.

    HOWEVER!

    The thing is you can still pay for the acquisition of their creation as they are giving you the disk on various media formats as a service, a convenience as apposed to downloading and burning / usb formatting yourself, plus you get the warm fussies of having the official disk and papers. Open-source developers get paid for this service of distribution for software which is inherently free and must otherwise depend on your support and generous contributions survive!

    Support is needed and respect should be given to all the contributors, maintainers, designers, ethical hackers, programmers, developers, marketers, distributors, moral supporters, the newbies, the software freedom lawyers, the GNU team, linus himself, the kernel guys and every other person who’s great work and efforts are pushing the open-source universe into the real world!

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16. *to survive

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17. The first thing I always do when I come to this site is c l i c k ing a d s 😉

    .

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18. Is there a budget or accountability for the money that is donated? I apologize if it is in forum that I have not come by. I am usually just looking for technical answers. With a lot of projects like this I wonder where the money goes. Mint does a good job of declaring the reciepts (at least I hope their honest). But where does the money go? What are the fixed expenses. What is spent each month? What additional features need funding, how much, etc. If the financials were more laid out then maybe more would be willing to support.

    Next I’ll be asking to vote on how the money will be spent. If there is already a place for that, let me know (I do vote on the new ideas area).

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    1. @Mike: It’s a valid query but it’s hard to answer. There’s no budget or policy in place in regards to spending. There’s a group of people who spend a lot of time on the project and who occasionally need to spend some money on something. There’s also recurring costs. I’ll try to give you an example by showing you a few of the costs. We’re currently running a competition on the Mint 10 backgrounds, at the moment so far, this is costing us $407. I put a Linux Mint Bug Squad in place with 4 people tackling bugs on a daily basis…. they’re helping a lot on this repetitive task, and if I want them to continue I need to send money their way, so we’re in the process of deciding how much and how this will happen. One of our developers needed a new computer so we bought him one. Then he needed money for personal reasons, so we sent him an additional $500. We’re not a company with paid staff, we’re a project which benefits from the free time the developers invest in, and when money can help their situation and help them giving us this time, then it’s worth spending. So far we bought new computers for Merlwiz, Exploder and Ikey as far as I remember, and with money coming in donations every month we’ve got the ability to spend that money when needed. There’s a plan to pay the members of the team every month, which is likely to start at the beginning of 2011, and which will transform our distribution from a project that people work on in their free time, to a project that people work on and make money from. This makes a huge difference in term of delays and innovation. I switched to working full time on this project last year and I left my job at the time and the impact on Linux Mint was phenomenal. I can now tackle much bigger tasks, as I’m basically looking at this 7 days a week from the morning till the evening. When guys with talent and skills such as our maintainers, our devs, our testers start working with me on this, not only when there’s no good movie on TV at night… as it is the case at the moment, but seriously as a hobby that gives them an additional income, as something they do regularly and on which we can talk about deadlines and objectives, then there’ll be another huge impact on this project. This is where the money goes really. Not so much on paying for hosting (we do have 5 dedicated hosts of course), hardware (we do buy hardware now and then) or other charges, but in making sure we can pay for the time involved and guarantee we don’t lose the talents and skilled devs we have working with us, as they become busy or when their personal circumstances mean they don’t have the time/focus to work on Mint anymore. Once this is achieved, the next step is to give them the ability to leave their jobs and live from their activity on Linux Mint, and here again, this has a huge impact on the project. I would just mention Ikey Doherty as an example. Having this developer work full time on Mint, from 9 to 5 every day along with me, you can imagine the roadmaps for each release would look significantly different! The best thing we can buy isn’t hosting, hardware or artwork at this stage, it’s people’s time and focus. We’ve got donations, sponsorships, advertising and a few commercial contracts in the equation and our ambition is clear, we will get there with paid staff and compete against bigger projects, it’s only a matter of time, and the money donated is helping in achieving this.

       PS: About the receipts, yes, they’re all there at the end of each month. We do round the sums in euro to USD (using the paypal currency rate), and the odd sums to round ones (i.e. $9.51 to $9.5). Donors don’t have the ability to decide how the money is spent but we do acknowledge the fact that they’re helping us and we thank each donor by an email and an entry in the listings.

       @detechy: I didn’t mean to “beg”. I expressed worry at the declining stats in donations. The project is healthy and there isn’t any financial risk that would make me go back to my job or quit the project. Don’t feel any pressure in donating to Mint. You’re helping us when you do so, financially and also in showing us appreciation, it’s not something we “need” to survive, it’s something that helps us grow. 57 people already donated close to $1,400 in these first 7 days. This is putting power in our hands. Not as much as Novell, or any sponsor of that size, but power nonetheless. I can go ahead on 99designs and contract agreements with more artists, I can also look at my Bug Squad and feel comfortable paying them more than I would have. Don’t be mistaken, without donations I’d still get artwork, I’d still have the bugs tackled, I’d still be working on Mint 10, but it would all be on a smaller scale. This is helping us do more, it’s helping us grow faster and so it’s extremely appreciated and of course, it hurts to see it be lower than it was last year. I didn’t mean to pressurize people or to sound like I was begging, we’re ambitious and this is helping us achieving our goal. I’m very thankful to see Mint funded so much by its own community and for us to be able to grow without losing focus and spending time on commercial activities. I’ll be honest, I don’t like seeing these figures go down, but I’m certainly not begging for money. My apologies if it sounded that way.

       Quick note about the hosting since we touched on the matter: We’re in pretty good shape in regards to hosting, with 5 dedicated servers around the world (website and repositories on 2 servers in Berlin, dev. server in London, forums/community in Toronto and a seeding server in Miami). We’re facing two small issues at the moment. The first one has to do with the load on the website and the blog during the times of a release. The second has to do with the load on the database in Toronto. Though it’s not a high-priority yet, we’re planning to get two additional dedicated servers, to separate website & blog, and also to separate forums & community_website. It’s too soon to say whether we’ll have each service hosted on its own dedicated server in the future, or whether we’ll use these 7 servers to create some kind of clustered network with load balancing and fault tolerance… either way, this is likely to happen at the beginning of 2011 as well.

    2. I forgot to mention something else… donating to upstream projects is very important as well. We considered sending money towards some upstream projects ourselves. Distrowatch does that on a monthly basis and we were tempted to follow their example. This is something we decided not to do though, since part of our income comes from direct donations and it would make little sense for a donor to see the money they contributed to us go towards something else… even though, our existence and our success partly relies on those of these upstream components. When you donate to an upstream project, it does of course indirectly help us and other Linux-related projects as a whole. Again, to the developer, and in the scope of an open-source project, it’s not so much as to tackle costs or fees or hardware purchases, but it boosts their confidence, their motivation, it improves the situation they’re in and it simply puts power in their hand and focus on their project.

19. if you want more, do not ask for donations, do something else
    you can’t go much further with donations
    by now, just say: “we need donations”; do not beg for it
    you can increase the amount on october but will decrease by november unless a big hit with 10 like 9
    will you beg again?

    i was a glad donor past few months (thanks to 9) and i realized, time after, that i really should gave my money, instead, to much more important part of linux such as gnome and kde, not some kind of distribution in first place (except for those who contribute, wasn’t the case with mint)

    and my plan was to donate only for each release of linux mint main edition; so, one donate each six months (fair? reasonable?), not every single month of the year, as i think as fair and reasonable idea

    i use only opensuse now, for some reasons that aren’t pertinent right now, and disagree with this sort of pressure on linux mint users by amount of donations received at all

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20. My advice to the Mint team is to innovate and distinguish the distribution the furthest they can without breaking compatibility. Make an integrated experience that you can’t get elsewhere in any other distribution. The mintMenu for instance is easily installable in Ubuntu, but in contrast with features integrated across your own customization of GNOME and Nautilus, along with attractive and useful services integrated across the OS layers, it becomes harder to have the Mint or a Mint like experience elsewhere. That is how you attach the users to the distribution, and have them honestly care about it. The more you give, the more you shall get.

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21. @detechy
    I agree in some parts with you. the other apllications need support in form of donations too, personal I make one donation per month, I decide by my monthly use of something were my donation go. And sometimes it was a wrong decision. If I make a donation I need for my feeling a reaction, a single thank you… and some Projects do not even send an automatic mail. And here is the difference, Linux Mint Users/Donors/Sponsors got a lot of reactions from the maintainer. And the Team hear what the community need.
    Other Project have a community too, but in a lot of cases they are only there to help other user in forums…. but are not, how can I explain it. In the mint community I feel to be more intergrated that in others.

    the point of sponsoring, my opinion is that if every single Mint user will only sponsoring with 1$, the project got more resources, with that the maintainer and the other developers can be more concentrated on the project and Mint become faster better, we got perhaps more Mint-tools (I think the Team and the community has a lot of ideas)… but for the singe user it will be only 12$ per year, compared to an windows license you can support Mint for more than 10 years… only my point of view.

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22. Thanks for the explanation Clem. Today I will make my first donation to Mint, my first donation to any open source effort. Personally, I feel that Mint is an outstanding distro deserving of support. The work that your team has put in is evident in each release.
    Compared to the money that I have spent on other operating systems in the past, my donation is small and the decision to donate was easy.
    Keep up the excellent work!!

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23. @clem
    thanks for the explanations, it is nice if you become bigger, but I only hope that if you got really big and popular, that the philosophy with that you start the Mint Project do not loose on importance.

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24. linux mint was introduced by my partner. as i’ve tried this, i really like it. it quite better than my past OS. i cant wait to see more new themes. 🙂

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25. Clem, well explained what Mint is about. You didn’t beg at all and I got worried also seeing the September numbers. You guys are doing a fantastic job and espending lots of time of your lives to our benefit. I will allways be gratefull for what you guy are doing and absolutly you can count on whatever contribution I can make to the project.

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26. I have just made my first donation. I love LinuxMint, but I love more LMDE. Great job. Thank you.

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27. sorry clem

    you keep me amazing on your polished and precise post and comments
    i was not expecting a response by the leader dev of linux mint for such a simple user, so don’t pay attention at it, you don’t even need to consider it

    i regret what i said before

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28. Iḿ considering a donation for the great job you’re doing. One question though: Main, KDE, LMDE, XFCE, LXDE,… Aren’t you spreading yourself a little thin? And by the way at first glance on the home page it looks as though LMDE is your main distro. Isadora itself doesn’t show in the slides. I had to point a newbie friend of mine to the download page.

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29. Oh, one other thing: Please focus on stability and reliability. Even if it means sticking to an older kernel. A major selling point of Linux is that it can revive an old rattling Windows XP machine as though it came just out of the box. So, it was sad to see that my old Dell Dimension 2400 (2002), which ran great on LM7, has major trouble with 8 and 9. Strangely it runs flawlessly and faster than ever on Maverick Beta1. But to any not that persistent Linux newbie it will send him/her running back to uncle Bill and Steve. Linux shouldn’t have these regressions on older, but not ancient, hardware from mainstream manufacturers. Please consider that many classrooms are still filled with them…;)

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30. I will donate again once you agree not to list all donations in US Dollars. If I donate in Euros, I want my donation to be shown in Euros!

    Donor Alistair H

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31. Clem

    I agree with you not sending money upstream.

    I donate to the projects that I want to donate to, and I do not expect my money to be sent elsewhere. I also donate to some of your upstream projects. All of these are carefully thought out by me. Yours is the first distro that I have sent money to, and it is to my annoyance that you did not respond to my personal message to you about currency (reflected above).

    If I thought that you were passing my money on to other projects (no matter how good they are) I certainly would not donate to yours again. My donation was to Mint, and not to anyone else!

    Alistair H

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