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Kiddix Pay What You Want Promotion - Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What will the funds raised in the "pay what you want" offer be used for?
A: We have a lot of ambitious goals at Kiddix. In general we would like to move forward on a number of initiatives, which are tied into the amount of support we receive from the community. In short, the majority of the funds will be utilized to help in our future development efforts and operational costs.
This is a short list of initiatives we are planning:
- Complete development of Kiddix 2.0:
- Additional hardware and mobile device support
- Completely revamped/enhanced kid's desktop
- Completely revamped/enhanced Parent View
- Refresh and extension of many of the applications that ship with Kiddix
- General operating system enhancements
- Integrate more seemless networking and wifi connectivity
- Complete the Kiddix open source transition
- Continue to build and support our growing Kiddix community
- Work on enabling partnerships to enable digital media integration into Kiddix
Q: Donate vs Buy? What am I donating?
A: If you are interested in supporting Kiddix, but don't have a direct use for the software, consider donating your license! We will be pooling all donated licenses for the duration of our "pay what you want" promotion, and will be giving them to selected children's organizations at its completion. If extra licenses remain we will continue to accept applications for other children's organizations or may distribute the software to families who would otherwise not be able to afford our software.
We are unable to process donated licenses through Google Checkout at this time.
Q: How can my organization be selected for donated Classmate PC's?
A: If you would like to have your organization be considered for a donation of Classmate PC's fill out this application. Unfortunately we can only consider organizations based in the U.S. at this time. An ideal candidate would be a daycare, childcare center, afterschool program, etc. who has a limited IT budget for purchasing computers. Organizations can be for-profit or non-profit.
Q: How will the donation program work?
A: Organizations interested and who meet the qualifications should submit an application to be considered for a donation. Organizations that do quality will be notified via email about their acceptance. Once the "pay what you want" promotion ends we will begin the distribution process. For each $10,000 we raise during the promotion we will donate two Intel-powered Convertible Classmate PC's to one selected organization. Once an organization receives a donation they will be unable to receive an additional donation. Organizations that did not receive a Classmate PC donation will instead be given donated Kiddix software licenses. We will do our best to fairly distribute the licenses to accepted organizations, but can't guarantee that enough licenses will be donated during the promotion to allow for each selected organization to receive a donation.
Q: I purchased Kiddix, what am I downloading?
A: We are offering a downloadable Kiddix "disk image" (e.g. ISO). An ISO is a complete CD-ROM packaged as one file. The Kiddix ISO is approximately 700MB in size.
Q: I downloaded the Kiddix ISO, now what?
A: To install Kiddix you will first need to burn the ISO to a CD-ROM. Most cd burning software will have an option that reads "Burn Image" or "Burn ISO". You will want to select this option to properly burn the image to disk. You will know if you have prepared your Kiddix CD-ROM properly if it shows multiple files and directories after burning. If it only shows the single 700MB ISO file, then you will need to prepare the CD-ROM again, using the "Burn Image" option on your cd burning software.
After you have prepared your Kiddix CD-ROM, follow these instructions to install Kiddix on your computer.
Q: What is the best way for my voice to be heard in the Kiddix community?
A: Sign up to our newly opened community web forums! We will be utilizing the forums as the main communications hub for our community.
Q: Are you trying to copy the recent fund raising success by 2DBoy, the Humble Indie Bundle, and Diaspora?
A: Yes! A "pay what you want" offer never crossed our minds until the aforementioned leaders embraced the idea first. We are excited to see the impact this will have on our initiatives, and it gives us an excellent opportunity to build our community and gather important feedback that will guide our future software development.
Q: Where can I get technical support for Kiddix?
A: The best first place to look is our support FAQ. Since we are expecting an influx of new users due to our "pay what you want" offer we won't be able to offer "official" technical support for Kiddix, however, we are transitioning support onto our community forums. On the forums you will be able to discuss issues with other community members, and Kiddix staff, who will be participating in discussion.
Q: When will the source code for Kiddix be available?
A: Soon! Our top priority after we have completed the "pay what you want" promotion is to complete the open sourcing of our Kiddix source code.
Q: How will Kiddix be licensed?
A: This may vary depending on package, but at the moment we are leaning to a dual licensed approach using the GPL and the Kiddix-EULA.
Q: So is Kiddix free now?
A: Not exactly. We are offering our source code to interested users to help us enhance functionality and provide the freedom open source software provides to all users. Kiddix will continue to be available as a paid software product, and revenue will be used to continue pushing forward our initiatives.
Q: I've used Edubuntu, Qimo, or another "kids" Linux distribution. How is Kiddix different?
A: Simply put, we don't aim to be a "Linux for kids". Instead, we utilize Linux and Open Source Software as a base for providing children with a full operating system designed just for them. As far as we know, Kiddix is, and has been, the the only OS on the market exclusively designed from the ground up for children.
Inside Kiddix we offer a fully customized desktop environment for children that has been designed with the help of parents, teachers, and development psychologists. Children have access to a wide variety of software which has all been customized to be used by children ages 4-11. Also included are many acclaimed open source applications, games, and educational material.
Simplicity and ease of use for both children and parents is a primary focus of our software design. On the backend parents have access to a variety of comprehensive and easy-to-use parental controls.
To learn more about our software explore our website for more details.
Q: Scott Merrill from CrunchGear asked: "...it doesn't seem to me that Kiddix has sufficiently explained why I should pay anything for their OS."
A: Mike Gualtieri from Kiddix answers: "Scott, I want to thank you for helping spread the word about our promotion! My twitter feed has been very active this morning tracking all the retweets of your article. I think you bring up a really good point, and admittedly we didn't really focus on what's different in Kiddix or why anyone would want to purchase it for their children on our promotion page.
It's true that given some time and effort a tech-savvy parent can create a great computing environment for their kids in Linux or <insert other OS here>. What we have tried to do with Kiddix is provide that experience in one package (kids applications, kids desktop environment, parental controls) so the tech-savvy parents can save some time and money and the non-tech savvy parents can benefit from less frustration. For the do-it-youself people our Kiddix software stack will be going full open source and it would be interesting to see how people utilize it, although the OS itself will not be "free as in beer" ("free as in juice" might work better here since we are taking about kids!), so we can continue to keep the doors open and our servers powered.
As to why someone would want to purchase Kiddix or donate a copy during our promotion, we want to give back to the community, and will be donating Classmate PC's and copies of Kiddix to children's organizations with limited tech budgets."
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