• Linux Users More Generous than their Paying Mac and Windows Counterparts?

    Date: 2011.04.19 | Category: Apple, Funny/Weird Things on the Net, Linux, Off the record, Windows | Tags:

    So, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants me to buy the “Humble Bundle” – a pay-what-you-think-is-fair financed bundle of computer games. Not only that, but you get a choice of who to pay, too.

    I went to the site and started reading – primary concern being, of course, “will it run on Linux?” I scrolled down and a pie chart caught my eye. The statistics for the previous Humble Bundle installment. An event that apparently resulted in the raising of $500,000 to EFF:

    Payment Statistics for the Humble Bundle, Show Linux Users as Being Exceptionally Generous

    Now, while Windows as a platform is the largest contributor, per user paying it’s also the smallest one, as you can see by the average purchase price by platform to the left. Actually, on average, a Linux user has coughed up about three times the amount a Windows user has. And about twice as much as the average Mac user.

    Now, why is that? Well, I’d like to think that we’re just better people, but that would be stretching it a bit ;) Either way, with more than 132,000 purchases it’s damn hard to dismiss as statistical error. Given that any PC these days is hard to get without Windows pre-installed, it’s not like we have the extra money left to spend that we didn’t use on the OS. What do you think?