Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Julie188 writes "Canonical has reacted to backlash over its insane deal with Banshee by establishing a marginally better new deal. Banshee is a media/music player for Linux (and Windows and Mac) that supports music purchases via Amazon MP3. It will ship with Ubuntu 11.04. Amazon pays 10% to its affiliates — websites and software that send it business. Banshee had been donating its Amazon affiliate proceeds to GNOME. But Amazon's MP3 store competes with Canonical's MP3 store, Ubuntu One. So Canonical thought that it should help itself to 75% of the affiliate money from Banshee/Amazon sales and leave 25% for GNOME. The Banshee group said no thanks, we'll disable Amazon for Ubuntu users. Canonical is refusing to let Banshee disable Amazon. It has instead said it will contribute some money from Ubuntu One to GNOME but it still intends on keeping the lion's share for itself."

I still like ubuntu

[ilsaloving]

I put ubuntu on one of my laptops because it Just Worked(tm). That was version 9.04. Everything on the machine worked, and it even handled setting up the broadcom wifi firmware for me so I didn't have to futz with fwcutter, et al.

I've been upgrading steadily ever since. At this point in time, I've been let down more often by the hardware itself (two HD failures and now the CPU is dying...) than by Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is stable, reliable, and the single most user friendly linux distro I have ever used, and it keeps getting better. It lets me do what I need to do without getting in my way so I have more time left over for other inconsequential things like... oh... my life.

I just don't get all this indignation regarding a company that is trying to put out a viable consumer friendly OS for free, while trying to make enough money (in an honest, not privacy invading way) so that it can continue to do so.

Re:Flamebait, not

[Klivian]

Uhm, no. That is not correct RTFA. As it is, the Banshee developers elected to disable the store by default, preferring it to Canonicals split deal. The Banshee developers decided that requiring the users to manually activate the store, but giving GNOME a 100% cut was preferable. Canonical asked the developers to choose from 2 options, but when their choice was not what Canonical wanted they simply did the opposite anyway.

Re:Flamebait

[retchdog]

fair enough. let's see if i have this gordian knot figured.

the banshee team default position is to take nothing for themselves and pass on the full referrer fee, i.e. 0.1 of banshee amazon purchases, to GNOME. banshee's amazon service steps on Canonical's ubuntu one service, so Canonical didn't like that and offered to give 25% to GNOME, making it 0.025 of banshee amazon purchases. banshee was pissed and wanted the amazon part removed completely from the ubuntu distro. Canonical is overriding this (it's their distro and the code is Free) but as a sop is kicking in 25% of their ubuntu one profit to GNOME.

apparently banshee has no financial self-interest in this matter, while Canonical has their own. if Canonical went with the banshee default, GNOME would get 0.1 of all amazon's gross profit through banshee (call it AGross). under Canonical's first offer, GNOME would get 0.025*AGross. under banshee's (imho rather hissy) counter-offer GNOME would get _nothing at all_ from ubuntu users. Canonical overrides this and makes the "benevolent dictator" offer that GNOME gets 0.025*AGross plus 25% of Canonical's net profit from ubuntu one, for a total of 0.025*AGross+0.25*UNet.

Yeah, Canonical are being assholes here (and it's worth noting, taking a very large middleman cut). However, GNOME's worst outcome would have been Banshee's counteroffer. The banshee default, which is 0.1*Agross, would be best for GNOME if UNet0.3AGross. I do find the latter VERY unlikely, so yeah, GNOME is getting shafted relative to the banshee default. On the other hand, they are doing better than if banshee had run their scorched earth policy, and Canonical has (imho) earned some soft social capital by offering a user-friendly linux and is thus delivering new money to GNOME.

here is the run-down: canonical benefits; banshee gets screwed but loses nothing in terms of cash; GNOME... well, it really depends on how big the buying-music-through-linux market is. i wouldn't personally be surprised if ubuntu quadruples this market, so GNOME may well pull out ahead.

in the bigger picture, it does seem a bit unfair in retrospect that novell (the banshee sponsor) fore went the first cut of these banshee-deals. on the other hand, they're novell...