In recent news, Ubuntu is going to be shipping 11.04 with Banshee as the default music player, instead of Rythmbox.
Banshee already had a deal with Amazon to take 100% of the shared revenues and send them to GNOME. Now Canonical wants to change that to 75% to Canoncial and 25% to GNOME.
Canonical already receives revenue from their UbuntuOne Music Store which users would purchase through Rythmbox. The Amazon music store is in direct competition with the UbuntuOne Music Store. Canonical is willing to send 25% of their revenue through the UbuntuOne Music Store to GNOME.
Previously somebody asked the Banshee group whether to change the % (to what Canonical is doing) or to disable the Amazon plug-in. The Banshee developers voted to disable the plug-in. Plus in the Banshee code was a request to not change this revenue redistribution.
Legally, there doesn’t look to be much Banshee can do to keep this from going through.
There are a lot of arguments dividing between whether;
Canonical is trampling over community and developer’s wishes and benefitting off the back of other developers who willingly decided to give their income to the larger GNOME project
-or-
whether Canonical is doing the “right” thing by opening up Banshee and the revenue stream (for GNOME) to a much larger userbase as well as a portion of their direct competitor, the UbuntuOne Music Store and competing more directly with the established OSs (Windows and Mac).
I have not ubuntu I have kubuntu but because I use Linux monomaxos which has Gnome It is good. Sorry for my off topic thema but monomaxos has banshee and it is really good.
I haven’t really followed this closely, but 75% just seems greedy. AFAIK Canonical has contributed nothing to the Banshee project as it’s developed into the first-class media player that it is, but now they want to ride on its success. Making it the default player in Ubuntu will widen Banshee’s user base somewhat, but based on their mailing list, it’s been a fairly popular alternative among Ubuntu users for a long time.
i could care less what Canonical gets from any of its commercial
ventures…as long as they are legal (in terms of the licenses involved…
and, i doubt if any Ubuntu user really cares how much Novell
makes…if they do, they should not use openSUSE, nor come here and
ask questions…(and, vice versa)
so, what “thoughts” do you expect us to have? and, why are you curious?
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11
I ask here for an “outside” point of view, outside of Ubuntu at least, based on the overall open-mindedness have I see here. I find many responses here to be more thoughtful than just “Me too!” or “+1” when the subject is complex.
The openSUSE segment varies from the other distributions, and I am curious how that translates into conflicts of such.
I would suspect a different overall view from the likes of Ubuntu, Debian, Mint and Fedora. Even though Debian, Mint and Ubuntu are related I would not be surprised if their view of this deal to be different.
On 03/07/2011 08:06 PM, dragonbite wrote:
>
> I ask here for an “outside” point of view
good answer…thanks…
but stillll, from my narrow perspective: though i believe Mark has
helped the free, open source and Linux projects, i just don’t care
what he does with his money, or how he intends to generate a return on
investment (if he intends that)…
i mean, it would be nice if he were willing to just pour all of his
millions into Linux as a pure gift…but, to me it is very ok if he
wishes to look at what he has put into Ubuntu as an investment,
rather than a donation…
and how he or the Ubuntu Foundation wants to insure a continuing
revenue stream is of no importance to me…if the Banshee
Foundation want to fight for a bigger share, then let them do that…i
do not care who gets the biggest cut…
are you a Banshee developer, or . . . ?
ymmv–by the way, as far as i recall i’ve never seen a Banshee
operating, nor had one installed, so maybe that has something to do
with my “don’t care” approach to this question/“problem”…
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11
It seems to me that Canonical feels powerful enough to play with their muscles.
It will eventually play out one way or the other, but i think it is a bad move just from a publicity standpoint.
Even if you are right, it doesn’t equal to a good policy.
Just imagine that before the Gnome project received a 100%before via Banshee. Now Banshee got lifted to the statues of Ubuntu’s first choice of installed player and now the cards turn. Now 75% of the revenue goes to Ubuntu (perhaps Unity) and 25% to the Gnome project. This is a win win situation i say.
Personally i think it is a bad business decission. Legally it might be correct.
And in the end, it is the users choice what he/she does with the knowledge about this situation.
If computer users around the world really cared about questionable moves/atitudes from software companies, M$ would be out of a job a long time ago. I doubt that this will have any real adverse effects on Canonical.
> Banshee already had a deal with Amazon to take 100% of the shared
> revenues and send them to GNOME. Now Canonical wants to change that to
> 75% to Canoncial and 25% to GNOME.
Something like iTune?
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First of all, it does not look good when Canonical first comes up with: “either we deactivate the Amazon Shop or we take 75% of the revenue for us” and then, after this story is going through the news, they come up with another proposal: “Yeah, ok, 25% of the Amazon Shop and 25% of the Ubuntu One shop go to the Gnome foundation”.
I mean, they are a company and the first proposal looked like that they as a company want to get rich on the expense of the Banshee guys (who are sponsored by Novell, by the way).
So then the second proposal comes up and this is… I don´t know… like as Canonical said “oh yeah yeah… its our fault sorry for that, lets save our reputation”.
For me, there is too much first trying to make money from everything by winding the community up and then when the community realizes that, there are excuses and apologies and what ever.
So Canonical and Mark are apologising too much in the recent time. Not because they are too soft, no because they mess around too much and are then forced to apologise, because otherwise the last piece of reputation is gone.
On the other hand, maybe there is now an increased amount of money from both shops, when there are some more users of Ubuntu.
But all this brings me to think about the business model of Canonical. I mean, they must now realize that it does not work out. They are there since 2004. Now it is 2011 and they still seem to make losses. Why they still stick to their strategy that they give away Ubuntu for free and with that, they also complicate the lives of other distros, like Suse who do not sell as much boxed versions anymore… this is beyond me.
My standing is quite simple… Did such action violate the MIT/X11 licenses? Apparently not. So from a license point of view there’s not really much to raise fingers. Then we have a management point of view: being Ubuntu One and Amazon competitors (one can replace totally or partially the other), and understanding that Ubuntu One is used to finance Ubuntu, it’s understandable they wanted to disable Amazon. It’s also important to consider that Canonical does support GNOME (for example they donated 15K’s $US for GNOME in the campaign to hire a SysAdmin).
I don’t see anything that strange, neither I do really blame Canonical for such a move, at least I seem to understand it. It’s interesting not to neglect that Canonical works to build and maintain their user base, which amongst Desktop users it’s said to be the biggest. Despite of the fees disputes, it seemed to me that they would still leave Amazon as an option, so users could really pick one. Considering that Ubuntu One according to some users has fewer options and is somehow more expensive, the users would eventually end up by picking up the option they liked more. Why not leave that to the users?
For the fees… I really can understand Canonical point of view… but I guess most people who ranted on them never runned a business… and I wonder if they runned a business what kind of decisions they would make But that’s just speculation… The ones who really end up winning a lot with this are opinion makers on the payroll in both sides (pro / con).
The problem is this.
The user things if he/she buys a song over that platform that they support the Gnome project.
Now this seems to change and even if the license issue is not an issue, it is a public releation issue. Of course one can argue that its a business. But i think that was never the issue really.
You can do business with a sledgehammer or with a flowers. The sound makes the music, like the saying goes.
But that’s just speculation… The ones who really end up winning a lot with this are opinion makers on the payroll in both sides (pro / con).