Maybe I’m missing something but at the very top of the download page it says:
If you have already paid to support and download Ardour, jump to the download page now…
With the link to click right there, I’m not sure how it could be any simpler…
Ok I had stayed out of this primarily due to lack of time but time to jump in now, and Paul correct me if I speak out of turn on any of this…
@circleio
One issue that has not been brought forth, and the primary reason things are like they are, is the fact that some people want to download without creating an account. If there is no account to create, there is no way to track this donation, and that is the primary reason the donate without download exists. So if you are going to try to address things, this is the first place to start.
Yes the primary maintenance of the website, and programming of Ardour as well, happens via a single person, Paul. Meaning more time spent on the website means less time he spends on Ardour. That isn’t to say that others can’t help, some do in fact, but for instance my time has been even more limited than Paul’s lately to be able to put forth the extra help I would like to for Ardour, so effectively we are back to a single person.
Now in as far as the concept of donation vs subscription. The single primary issue that would address this is that Paypal does not allow you to put money in your account and participate in a subscription without tying it to a credit card. This is a major point of issue for many people, but as of yet Paul, despite knowing and realizing how much of an issue this is, has not seen a different method that addresses this in a satisfactory manner without sacrificing other needed abilities like cross country payments, or at least improves it enough to make it worth the effort to implement a different payment provider.
Relatively easy to implement can mean some very different things, especially if you don’t want to spend a month working on it:)
@linuxdsp
You will likely find laws regarding this shift depending on where you are. To my specific knowledge, and IANAL applies here, there is no such requirement in the US. If there was, then I would be curious how things like Kickstarter exist which often fundraisers offered through it often imply donating and receiving a reward of some sort. This is a common occurrence as well in fundraising in the US.
SeabladeWell maybe I am the one missing something then because at the top of the download page there are two options with radio buttons, “Ardour 3.5.380 for Linux x86_64” and “Ardour 3.5.380 for Linux x86”. There’s no submit button next to them, the only button on the page is “Continue” at the bottom. If I remember correctly, I had clicked “Continue”, made a donation of $10 via PayPal and was then lead to a page that said thank you for your donation… and that was it, no links or prompts for downloading.
Because there was no obvious download, I searched around and found a page asking for an invoice number if I had bought it… but of course, in the current system there is no invoice for a donation… and I’m struggling here to see the difference between a donation and a “Buy it”. I mean, either way the money goes for the same cause and it would make sense that a donor has the option to download, even if they never do.
Sorry, but my experience wasn’t as straightforward as it could of been. Just in case it’s a browser issue, I’m using chromium on linux.
Subscriptions could be avoided if downloads were available for 6 months after donations. An email reminder could be sent in the final month. I think it would simplify things from 3 options (subscribe, buy or donate) to just one donation. And also, is there really any value in $1 donations? Didn’t I see somewhere that the average was $6 / person?
Yet the point is that subscriptions provide the most stable form of income for Ardour’s development (aka Paul) so they should in fact be encouraged.
Aside from that, the 6 months after donations thing is troublesome, not only because you actually do have to create and maintain a system to support that, but also because it is dangerous in some cases to make old versions available at all, perfect example is the version before this where you could actually lose data, something that should never happen, but was happening to some people in seemingly random circumstances.
SeabladeMaybe there is some misunderstanding with the 6 month idea. I’m not suggesting old versions are made available for download, but rather, the latest downloads are available to the user for 6 months after payment.
I thought you said there were problems with subscriptions, something to do with credit cards being tied to them.
I can’t say for sure if a simplified system would produce more money than subscriptions. Nor can I say if people are put off by subscriptions, I just know subscriptions are not my personal preference e.g. varying dollar rate. Can I ask, what percentage of the fund comes from subscriptions vs one-off payments?
Maybe there is some misunderstanding with the 6 month idea. I'm not suggesting old versions are made available for download, but rather, the latest downloads are available to the user for 6 months after payment.
So then you want a 6 month subscription really. And you want the ability to pay for it all at once. Again still a subscription, and actually not an uncommon option in other areas of software purchase, however requires a not insignificant amount of work to implement.
Ignoring the subscription side of things, you are back to requiring an account on Ardour.org for every possible donation, not something that some people would find desirable. I already obviously have an account, but would likely avoid donating to a project if I had to make another account for me to keep track of, I have to many on different websites as it is.
I thought you said there were problems with subscriptions, something to do with credit cards being tied to them.
The problem is that in at least some cases Paypal has decided that having money in the account isn’t enough to pay for a re-occuring subscription. You have to tie a credit card to it, which is not an option to everyone. As a result some people have not been able to get a subscription. However as I said other options that have been looked at (And I know of a fair few) have not provided enough benefit for Paul to see a reason to devote his time to implementing them at this stage of the game and take away time from other things. So instead we have three options depending on what you want, which I find to personally be acceptable as do many others.
I can't say for sure if a simplified system would produce more money than subscriptions. Nor can I say if people are put off by subscriptions, I just know subscriptions are not my personal preference e.g. varying dollar rate. Can I ask, what percentage of the fund comes from subscriptions vs one-off payments?
I couldn’t begin to answer that, I think there may be a post from Paul on that somewhere on the website, but my recollection is that a very much not insignificant amount comes from subscriptions, and in particular the part of the income that can be depended on and budgeted from tends to be via subscriptions as you can be reasonably confident they will still exist next month. Compared to straight donations which tend to ebb and flow, sometimes significantly, see the goals and finances from last month for instance, which were significantly down compared to a major release month which sees them up.
Seabladecircleio:" as far as I know, your memory of your process on the website is false. If you got to a page that offered you the 32 or 64 bit choice, and then clicked “Continue”, you would have been on a page that uses the word “Pay” several times and has no Donate/Donation button. If you were not taken back to a download page after interacting with PayPal, you did not use the “Buy” button.
Just a couple of little details to add to Seablade’s comments above. In general, Ardour development is typically being done by myself and one other person who works on it somewhere between half and full time and typically receives zero or very little financial recompense. For the last year or more, that other person has been Robin Gareus. The requirement for a credit card linked to a PayPal account is not fixed, and varies both country by country and possibly even user by user. The upper right financial info box shows precisely what comes from subscriptions and income to date for the given month. You will see that it is dominated by subscriptions. A large number of people sign up at the $1/month level. People who have not been involved with developing web-interactions with PayPal tend to underestimate some of the complexities involved. In particular, there is no API to query existing subscriptions.
I give up, really, you’re being impossible. Do what you will because you will anyway. On the one hand you don’t want to force accounts on people, yet it turns out, the reality is you’re highly dependent on subscriptions (and therefore accounts). There are solutions to such things, such as signing in with social media (just one example)… but, oh god, I can almost hear the fingers tapping out, “but not everyone has a social media account”.
Then when I suggest a higher income for 6 months of download, somehow that gets turned into a “subscription”. God know where that came from. It doesn’t have to be a subscription, you just send out an email reminder in the final month. Ah, but wait, “A large number of people sign up at the $1/month level”. Do the math, $10 / 6 = $1.67/month, an instant boost of 67% from that “large number of people”. Heck, 6 months, subscription or not, you’ve increased your income (and therefore development) yet it’s not imposing. To quote one of the users here, “Easy and pretty cheap for what it is - it would be like paying postage only for a CD.” The truth is, if you offer $1 payment, invariably some people are going to pay just $1. For some reason, I have this feeling someone’s now going to tell me that $10 is just too expensive.
As for my recollection of the payment process… maybe it is flawed but when I wrote my description, I did at least bother to retrace my actions. StillLearnin had thought the download process was simple / uncomplicated, which is why I made the point of describing the process. To save you going back through previous posts…
“…at the top of the download page there are two options with radio buttons, “Ardour 3.5.380 for Linux x86_64” and “Ardour 3.5.380 for Linux x86”. There’s no submit button next to them, the only button on the page is “Continue” at the bottom” No doubt, no one here will see the problem with that.
The underlying point seems to be lost; this complaining guy with an incomplete memory didn’t find your download and payments process as intuitive as other sites. I’ve lived and worked on computers and networks all my life and I’m telling you straight, the process can be improved, which in turn would lead to more income and increased development. But it seems you’re so tied to subscriptions and little-but-steady income, that breaking out of this and trying something new - for better or worse - is just plain too scary. There’s your limit right there, self-imposed.
I am not so conceited to think these are the best suggestions, but it seems I’m the only person offering them; a more positive and productive process than looking to find fault with them don’t you think? Instead of looking for fault, you’d do better to think, “how can we make things better?”
Goodnight people.
The underlying point seems to be lost; this complaining guy with an incomplete memory didn't find your download and payments process as intuitive as other sites. I've lived and worked on computers and networks all my life and I'm telling you straight, the process can be improved, which in turn would lead to more income and increased development. But it seems you're so tied to subscriptions and little-but-steady income, that breaking out of this and trying something new - for better or worse - is just plain too scary. There's your limit right there, self-imposed.
No I think you have missed my point. Which is that, yes there are better options, but either they cost significantly more money, or more importantly a significant investment in time. You CANNOT do anything involving financial info quickly, it won’t get done right and that is going to lead to all sorts of problems, much more than “I simply can’t download and need a refund” which by the way was offered here and isn’t as common as you might think for the amount of downloads this project has. So the trade off is not an obvious improvement when you are discussing taking a month or more of time from the single full time developer on this project to implement, vs him continuing his work on the project to fix known, and in some cases serious, issues.
I am not so conceited to think these are the best suggestions, but it seems I'm the only person offering them; a more positive and productive process than looking to find fault with them don't you think? Instead of looking for fault, you'd do better to think, "how can we make things better?"
There is no ‘looking for fault’ they were looked for some time ago and many were listed and at the time the decision was made on what the best road forward based on current resources and return on investment. You seem to think you are the only one that has offered these suggestions. That would be far from true, in fact it was discussed significantly on the redesign of the website for A3 among several other times. The goal isn’t to scare you off, but to try to explain why things are the way they are. If you are competent in knowledgeable in the regulations surrounding financial transactions that you are qualified to implement a much better system yourself and wish to volunteer your time to do it, then lets start by writing a full proposal as a starting point and include qualifications to do so. But the forum is not the place to do so.
Then when I suggest a higher income for 6 months of download, somehow that gets turned into a "subscription".
Because what you described IS a subscription, even if only a one time payment for a limited subscription. Look around at other specialized software sales and you will find this is not uncommon, nor am I saying it is a bad thing, but as I mentioned above requires work to implement correctly. But for examples of why I call this a subscription, see Autocad(Monthly, Quarterly, and Annual Options), QCad(Exactly what you described, and has an open source component to the project), and a host of other specialized software like RFGuru(Also what you described). These are just what I deal with on a regular basis and can think of off the top of my head. Again I don’t consider it a bad idea, but the infrastructure is not there to support it and as of right now has not been seen as a significant enough return on investment to invest the time needed to implement it, vs what many people do which is just get an account and pay while signed in with their account as part of the download process(Even $1) when they just want to download the current version.
Seabladecircleio: you also seem to think that we don’t want to make things better. We are hamstrung right now by the fact that PayPal remains the only viable option for worldwide “peer-to-peer” commerce unless you require credit cards (which are much less common in many parts of Europe than they are in the US). I put quite a bit of time into redeveloping the subscription system to use Braintree Payments who had MUCH nicer APIs (though they are credit card only) and slightly better transaction fees. I was almost ready to launch that code when guess what happened … PayPal bought Braintree. They didn’t touch the APIs (at least not then) but I just gave up - there was no point continuing to work with the Braintree stuff if ultimately PayPal was calling the shots on their somewhat different business model. PayPal has not yet incorporated any of Braintree’s vastly improved APIs into their own APIs, leaving us still stuck with their clunky and for some purposes non-existing pile of stuff.
You may be interested to know (or not), I have found the download pages are different depending on whether you are signed in or not. I have taken screenshots to show you; http://6am.net/ardour-diff.png
As you can see, when I am signed out there are two buttons. Clicking the first button takes me to pages where I can enter an email and download relatively easily. However, when I am signed in, there is only one button which consequently asks me to pay. I’ve got this horrible feeling someone’s going to tell me this is normal and expected…
No, that’s a bug. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Or rather, the two different pages is expected, but the content of the “not signed in page” is incorrect.