Hey,
most of you might not have heard of flattr.
it's a social micropayment system from sweden. it was launched by the guys behind pirate bay and it's quite popular in germany and other european countries - but of course it's a worldwide system.
Check out the video on flattr.com: it explains the service better than I could have done with 1000 words.
There is an idea in the brainstorm about integrating it into the software center.
And there are already some software developers that joined like Shutter, the Debian package manager and Debhelper.
A lot of Ubuntu-related blogs (mostly from Germany) are on board, too. Like the popular http://linuxundich.de/ . The author plany a feature that randomly displays FLOSS Software to flattr it on his blog.
I had some contact with the guys behind OMG! Ubuntu!, they'll make a post on flattr soon.
Ok, enough background information.
I'm convinced that flattr has a big potential on giving developers the posibility for easily getting financiel support for their work. This works for users, too: they can -once they are registered- make a small donation with just one click.
Of course there are disadvantages: At the moment, flattr get's 10% for the service and server infrastructure. They are aiming at cutting this down once they have a wider user base. For the moment only payments by paypal are allowed, but this will change soon.
The service is still in beta (it's open since a couple of days) but it already showed great dynamics. There are even some mayor German newspapers (like taz.de) that are participating. In the closed beta taz.de was able to get nearly 1400€ in a month. A popular German podcaster received more than 1000€ for his podcasts. (These amounts are quite considerable having in mind that there were at max. 30 000 users in the closed beta).
Wikileaks is using it, Tor is using it, JDownloader is using it... I think it could be used in Ubuntu, too.
I think flattr will be very succesful, Ubuntu could jump on the train and take advantage of it.
Thinking of an implementation in the Software Center: UBuntu could get a small share of every click done through it.
I'm sure these social micropayments are the financing mechanisms of the often mentioned "web 2.0".
What do you think?
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