Please review for correctness.
| Standard | Premium | Expert | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payment per month | $5.99 | $9.99 | $19.99 |
| Helping maintain releases and bug fixes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Helping push code to other projects | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Helping new developments of existing applications | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Helping advance commonly requested features | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Helping innovations and new development | ✓ | ||
| Helping with growth | ✓ | ||
| Helping enumerate features to get added to PureOS | ✓ |
When I payed for Purism hardware products I had to pay extra money for the transatlantic payment itself. I don’t want that for a monthly subscription to happen. I’d like these things to be clarified.
Generally I think the regular payment is the direction to go because both subscription and it it’s payment is now an ongoing process like the software development process itself so both go along together now and this is hopefully a sustainable construction.
On the other side Purism must have planned to spend part of the income from it’s hardware products sales to go into software development.
So here is a proposal I would like to hear opinions about:
Give everyone that subscribes to the PureOS subscription for a certain period (e.g. 24 months or so) a discount coupon for Purism’s shop. The downside would be that while the income increases by the subscription it decreases by discounting product prices. So if this should work it must be well balanced.
The possible upsides would be:
To get a picture, subscription income for 24 months would be
Another improvement could be a priority in the support queue for the subscribers.
So basically the FSF associate membership approach:
Associate Member Benefits — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software
I am fine with the idea, as long as the discount also equally applies to the Purism x SLNT collaboration products, and that there is also a lump-sum option for the store-wide discount.
Also subscribed to the Expert tier. I can only hope I’m one of many 
I have to admit, it would be more rewarding if I could somehow pick a target for the money, like a specific bug or nuisance to be fixed.
You can donate to specific developers instead if you prefer. Otherwise there is also Fund Your App, although it is no longer maintained at this point.
I can completely understand why you would say that but I think that could get complicated due to dependencies on upstream and due to interdependencies between components.
I donated to that in the past. Between Fund Your App, a donation and a donation subscription, I suppose Purism is trying to create ways for people to pick how they want to contribute that suits them best. I like the subscription model in this case, because it’s only a relatively small amount and the support is continuous. I might be willing to donate $20/month, whereas $240/year all of sudden seems like something I might want to do, but will postpone indefinitely because it seems like a lot of money 
I heartily agree with this agenda of work!
“PureOS will continue to be freely available for all, there is no product difference for subscribers or non-subscribers.”
Subscribed and supporting FREE software. Feels right and true.
Awesome, Thank you. 
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I’m wondering what makes Purism’s case potentially part of the problem. Is it because they labeled it a “subscription” instead of “membership” or “recurring donation”? Is it because Purism is not a non-profit but a social purpose corporation (Announcement post [2017]: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-now-a-social-purpose-corporation/)?
The FSF, LibreOffice, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, and many others ask for some sort of donation. System76 accepts donations for Pop!_OS (Click the “Support Pop” button).
If Purism does impose enshittification of their products, they aren’t locked down so we can use other software instead of PureOS and also hire people to work on alternatives (like what some other forum members have looked into, and this too).
@WinstonSmith was referring to a quote from the blog post:
If for whatever reason you are still concerned about PureOS not being free in the future, you can utilize the Four Freedoms underpinning its software license for your own needs:
Fortunately, there is no reason to fear.
This “subscription” program provides zero benefits to subscribers that are not available to non-subscribers. It is just a recurring donation initiative.
Purism has given every indication that they are committed to Free Software. If you have seen otherwise anywhere, please let me know, but I think you will find no examples of Purism saying anything but that they will only ever make Free Software.
I love this initiative, and I think it shows desire and commitment by Purism to restart their software development efforts. Rather than Purism giving up on software forever and focusing only on hardware sales, this initiative says to me that Purism wants to get started again on software development.
Purism is showing interest to do their part in furthering Free Software. If people have no spare money and are just trying to survive and pay their bills, they should take every advantage of Free Software without feeling guilt for not paying. It is available to them and they harm no one by using it freely. For the rest of us, the question now is, are we committed like Purism is to Free Software, or are we free-riders who just don’t care?
the one concern with the purism post is that it is not explicitly stating what the roadmap is for which the funds are supposed to be used, i think more folks may subscribe if they knew exactly what the return on investment will be and a rough timeline to see the value in subscribing - as in what is in it for me
This thread was featured in the following video from Brodie Robertson: [YouTube] [Piped Video]
My recs to leadership for adjustments:
I would have to clarify with leadership, but I suspect that the “subscription vs donation” semantic is due to taxation implications. I personally see this as a stepping stone toward getting back to a new-and-improved “Fund Your App” campaign, to perhaps be elegantly integrated once the implementation details are fully fleshed out.
I think patches merged in Debian kernel first (since getting all patches upstreamed to mainline kernel can take a while) can help leverage the work done by debian kernel team (it will also free up time from both pureos and mobian developers to focus on other tasks) https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/666 Users will be able to use Debian directly as well and get support from its existing community.
This would mean, kernel updates come via trixie-backports without much effort from PureOS or Mobian.
I’m proposing a different method of more targeted fund raising for mobian trixie (but those changes would be useful for PureOS Dawn as well) Debian on mobile feature prioritizing and fund raising proposed structure Those who want a more transparent process and result based fund raising may want to join hands.