Canonical Now Prefaces Ubuntu Download with Donation Suggestion Page

I haven’t been able to pin-point when exactly it happened, but Ubuntu-developer Canonical has introduced a donation suggestion page that prefaces the download of the desktop version of Ubuntu. While it’s not uncommon for open-source projects to openly accept donations to help fund them, Canonical’s move here is much more obvious, and even a bit creative.

After choosing the edition of Ubuntu you want, you’ll be brought to a page with the title, “Tell us what we should do more…”. Here, a Humble Bundle-like array of sliders allow you to choose where your donation money goes. Want to directly fund the folks who optimize games under Linux? You can do that. Yearn for a tablet version of Ubuntu? Ditto. Much like the Humble Bundle, you can donate to everything evenly or focus on just one category. You can even “tip” Canonical for making it all happen.

To give you an idea of how modest your donation is, an example of what you could have used the money for is displayed. At $15, you could have had a t-shirt – and surely an open OS is worth much more than that, right? If you were to go full-board and donate $1,000, you’re told you could have bought an eight-year-old dromedary camel – which, presumably would eventually die. Ubuntu hopefully won’t.

It’ll be interesting to see how successful this proves to be – if Canonical does end up releasing numbers, that is. It sure can’t hurt, because while it’s easy to assume that a project doesn’t need your support, this helps bring to mind that it does. And if you use Ubuntu regularly, chances are any donation will pale in comparison to a Windows license!