This is an example of how it is usually easier to make something suck than to make it better...or the endless appeal of the idea "Hey, let's monetizing sucking." The fundamental user behavior here is what I've been calling "the shareware problem."
The shareware problem lives at the intersection of rationale economics and ethical dilemma. It's rooted in human psychology. It goes like this:
Some decades ago, I had twenty or so shareware programs on my computer. For historical reasons, by "on my computer" I include on floppy disks that I could stick in it. On average, the requested payment was $15 or $20. Some of the programs I used regularly. Some I used sometimes. Some I used rarely or not at all.
The essence of the problem is that paying for all of them was a non-trivial amount of money $300-$400 and this importantly this amount was greater than the aggregate value relative to commercial software. I mean I wasn't getting value from all that shareware equivalent to Borland Office Suite, and it was only $99.
So the economically rational alternatives were to pay for some the shareware on my computer but not all of it. The problem with that is once I am not paying some shareware authors, I'm not behaving ethically in a system of ethics where shareware authors deserving payment is an ethical principle. Damn you Kant! So I might as well not pay anyone...or make paying the exception so that I feel good when I do it.
That's why shareware went away and non-corporate backed open source projects struggle for funding and why this scheme may backfire...there's too much software in the world (orders of magnitude more than when I had shareware on floppies).
It seems your example justifies the reasoning behind Elementary's change.
You can select $0 and continue with automatic updates if you would like, the purpose of the change was to add an option to users who may consider paying the developer now they've gotten to use the application. Previously the only time you could pay was before downloading.
Now, if you wanted to disperse $99 across every application, you could do so. Or $50. Or $25. Just pay each developer what you will.
People will always find justifications for monetizing suck. But this passage from the article captures the fundamental psychology:
By not including paid apps in “Update All”, there is a bit of a convenience tax if you choose not to pay continually. We know that nag screens are inconvenient. They’re meant to be. We know that paying is also inconvenient, so we have to level the playing field a bit.
Basically, the developers see themselves in competition with their users, e.g. the sports metaphor. That's how features that are deliberately contrary to the user's interests get rationalized. It helps that it is easier to make software suck than to make it valuable enough that users will pay up front.
I'd put it this way, to be morally consistent the developers of Elementary OS apps probably ought to donate a large fraction of whatever they collect to all those open source projects that live upstream upon which the Elementary OS ecosystem depends. Think Ubuntu, Debian, FSF, and the thousands of other projects that allow Elementary OS to work. I mean $100 spread across the ecosystem is probably less than $0.01 per contributing package.
To me, the moral claim looks weaker than it was in the days of shareware and paid tools and operating systems. It's even weaker than a moral claim based on the iOS app store today.
Last week a relative of mine mentioned that "the new Windows" I gave her is so much faster and easier to use. I had helped her fix all kinds of issues with Windows for years, usually updates causing BSOD/boot errors. Over Thanksgiving I just came over for another tech support session but brought an Elementary USB and put that on a partition and gave her Google Chrome, Spotify, and set up her printer/scanner. She says her old PC (Core 2 Quad/6gb ddr2) is faster than the day she got it and she likes the dock of apps instead of the Windows taskbar. I'm very happy with Elementary and I don't mind at all donating to a project that's really putting Linux on the desktops of regular people.
Wait, so, they're developing a single convenient mechanism for preventing apps from changing themselves out from under you, and they're giving it away for free? You only get the annoying "hey guess what I just 'upgraded' myself overnight, sucks for you if you don't like it" behavior if you pay extra? Well, sign me up, this sounds like a win, I'll be happy to simply refuse to pay for the behavior I don't want.
The shareware problem lives at the intersection of rationale economics and ethical dilemma. It's rooted in human psychology. It goes like this:
Some decades ago, I had twenty or so shareware programs on my computer. For historical reasons, by "on my computer" I include on floppy disks that I could stick in it. On average, the requested payment was $15 or $20. Some of the programs I used regularly. Some I used sometimes. Some I used rarely or not at all.
The essence of the problem is that paying for all of them was a non-trivial amount of money $300-$400 and this importantly this amount was greater than the aggregate value relative to commercial software. I mean I wasn't getting value from all that shareware equivalent to Borland Office Suite, and it was only $99.
So the economically rational alternatives were to pay for some the shareware on my computer but not all of it. The problem with that is once I am not paying some shareware authors, I'm not behaving ethically in a system of ethics where shareware authors deserving payment is an ethical principle. Damn you Kant! So I might as well not pay anyone...or make paying the exception so that I feel good when I do it.
That's why shareware went away and non-corporate backed open source projects struggle for funding and why this scheme may backfire...there's too much software in the world (orders of magnitude more than when I had shareware on floppies).