My problem with their project funding argument is that I'm not an investor. An investor has lots of money, and so is more willing to accumulate risks for the payoff of creating a stable enterprise.
It's not rational for me as a consumer to fund such an unsure bet, especially when changing an operating system has lots of friction. I assume that the proposed talent of an individual investor is in the ability to sieve good from bad in a sea of maybe. But I also don't understand the market well enough to see how such an unproven bet might succeed in a very stale market dominated by arguably one entity (you can't really buy macOS) -- maybe two.
I'd also say that while software work is expensive and requires talented labor, and while operating system work takes an intense amount of effort, there's something to be said about the fact that Elementary OS could even build their OS to begin with. How did they do it? On the backs of billions of dollars of free labor. I can't imagine how it would be if the whole world hid their source code with proprietary-only software, and Elementary had to start from ground 0.
Your argument would make sense if it weren't pay what you like, with the option to pay zero, and the default option being less than the price of a sandwich.
You mention that investors have lots of money and are therefore able to take on risks. I suspect that nearly everyone who would consider downloading this operating system has a lot of money relative to the $5 suggested donation, and certainly relative to the $1 you could choose instead. And if you truly don't have that, then you can do $0 instead.
You can make the risk to yourself arbitrarily low, selecting whatever you think fits your profile of cost vs potential reward. That is their rational model.
It's not rational for me as a consumer to fund such an unsure bet, especially when changing an operating system has lots of friction. I assume that the proposed talent of an individual investor is in the ability to sieve good from bad in a sea of maybe. But I also don't understand the market well enough to see how such an unproven bet might succeed in a very stale market dominated by arguably one entity (you can't really buy macOS) -- maybe two.
I'd also say that while software work is expensive and requires talented labor, and while operating system work takes an intense amount of effort, there's something to be said about the fact that Elementary OS could even build their OS to begin with. How did they do it? On the backs of billions of dollars of free labor. I can't imagine how it would be if the whole world hid their source code with proprietary-only software, and Elementary had to start from ground 0.
What rational model governs this situation?