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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."
Ok, I'm getting a new business laptop in a week or so anyway, so it's the perfect time to start using debian instead of Ubuntu anyway.
I can't say I will mind, the last couple of Ubuntu releases were shit, I couldn't even upgrade to the last one as a bug is still unfixed that makes wifi speeds crawl at 70kbyte/s tops for certain wireless cards.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
...ruins everything.
Remember the story a few days ago about why Ubuntu no longer gets love from slashdotters and the Linux community? I think shenanigans like this says it all.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Isn't this more about Libre meaning being able to do the wrong thing?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Which makes this whole kerfluffle look a bit ridiculous. But more than that, how does Canonical have control over the money that Banshee is donating to GNOME? Does Banshee send a check to Canonical with a request that it be forwarded to GNOME?
http://www.managemyproperty.com/
I downloaded Ubuntu a while back because it was simple to install, it was straightforward to use, and it meant I didn't have to spend my time doing sysadmin-y things.
But what is all this bullshit about integrated mp3 stores? I want a fucking operating system with some basic general-purpose tools. If I want to buy mp3's I'll go do that; I don't want my operating system worrying about how I should. (Of course, I expect my distribution to include a media /player/ -- that's something else entirely.)
Remember, it is free as in libre, not gratis.
According to whom?
Your comment about "real" Linux users is basically the attitude that turns off a lot of people from even listening to reasonable arguments about free (libre) software.
Yeah yeah, whatever... If you're a real linux user, uninstall whatever distro you have et build it from scratch, with a butterfly....
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
Dirty hippies all over the world vow to not bath again until travesty corrected. How is this newsworthy? Business stay in business by making money, Canonical must start sometime.
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
This is a complete mischaracterization of what has happened. There have been several bloggers that have been outraged on the behalf the Banshee/Gnome developers, but the Banshee devs have not been upset with this decision.
In fact, the situation is far better than the summary says. First, Banshee will ship with the store enabled on Ubuntu with a 75/25 affliate split between Canonical and Gnome, respectively. Neither side has a problem with this. Second, the official Canonical music store will do a similar split (75/25), even though Gnome doesn't have anything to do with its development.
Sure, the deal sounds like shit for Gnome, especially the Banshee part, but the freaking people that develop the application weren't upset by it. Furthermore, Canonical is splitting their store.
The developers that have the right to complain about this decision aren't, so it doesn't seem like anyone else should either.
Canonical isn't perfect, but why such the hate lately? If you aren't a developer or directly related to the Gnome Foundation, STFU. Stop being outraged on other people's behalf.
UBUNTU ROCKS! FTW!
What a mess. Ubuntu / Canonical rubbing people up the wrong way again.
Thank goodness for Amarok.... that is, when Amarok developers eventually get their fingers out of their behind and add back all the features they stripped from KDE3 Amarok 1 for the so called "improved" KDE4 Amarok 2 version.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Your comment about "real" Linux users is basically the attitude that turns off a lot of people from even listening to reasonable arguments about free (libre) software.
According to whom?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Nothing wrong with making a buck, its how you do it that matters.
This does smell a bit foul.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
ya know ubuntu gives away it's OS. where is the income?
have you donated to them lately? you just downloaded it and expect them to keep making it for free? for you?
I'm no Ubuntu fan really, but I find it quite funny how the GNOME devs are famous for not giving a fuck about their users opinions, and still they're somehow outraged when someone doesn't give a fuck about theirs.
Jesus had a UNIX beard.
If Banshee disables Amazon, then theoretically that would increase the sales to Canonical's MP3 store. So by disallowing Banshee from doing this, basically Canonical is saying that their 75% cut of the affiliate money from people willing to buy MP3s from Amazon is more profitable than the direct sales they would get from people willing to buy from their no-name MP3 store. In the spirit of the original article, I tried to be as confusing with this post as possible.
The problem Linux has had is the ability to help a company keep it's lights on. When it's sold by companies like IBM or Redhat, people are paying for the name more than the product. The community, which is a strength of Linux, is rather harsh when you try stuff, screaming about the "free as in beer/speech" bit.
:P And before anybody asks, I've paid for several distros directly from the teams as a way to show my support. The Lycoris team, for example, was doing a great job. Not everybody is lucky enough to have their efforts rewarded by a buyout, though.
And that's fine. The strength of one's opinion is why we love Linux. Still, most ignore the fact that the free "as in beer" part still has to be paid by somebody. So the community ends up ditching the distro and going elsewhere. That's fine too. One has to wonder, though, how long companies or individuals will be willing to put up cash to finance a distro's infrastructure when the community has issues with recouping costs. If you've sent money (or time) their way in some way, shape or form, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about average users who give nothing back to the system other than notching the download meter count up by one. This mass hurd, while useful for gaining momentum, is also a fickle problem that needs to be addressed in some way.
"Free: The Future of a Radical Price", by Chris Anderson, is an interesting read on how "free" worked and works. Oh, and look, no affiliate link. Free link!
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
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.
a couple possibilities.
1. they hate their job, the compromises they must make to survive it, therefore anything involving profit = evil, because their own workplace requires them to be such heartless turds.
2. they live in their parents basement and dont understand the emotional weight of a lack of an income stream
3. they believe any sort of corporation involvement will pollute the thoughtspace of linux (nevermind the fact that linux exists because of massive corporate donations)
4. speculation... maybe they are scammers themselves, who see in others the evil they know is within them?
To real Linux users.
Face it, Canonical has gone rogue, just like Oracle and Novell. Remember, it is free as in libre, not gratis. If you are a "real" linux user, uninstall Ubuntu.
How dare they want to make money while supplying the world with a FREE operating system! Free as in you-don't-have-to-pay-anything-for-it-ever-so-stop-whining. Or, hey, maybe if you donate enough money they won't have to resort to such commercialization.
Seriously - how can you be so naive and so arrogant?
I used to hate it. I was a very, very, very hardcore debian guy. Ive built some freaky stuff with debian, until I went into bussiness and had to use redhat. Anyhow, i never liked what ubuntu did to debian and now im on fedora 14 and I have no plans whatsoever to move to anything else.
I love this thing. Its not at all what fedora used to be, which I hated.
NO SIG
Something sure does seem fishy about this whole arrangement, so I can understand why bloggers have been going apeshit (though the developers seem OK with it). Historically, this was a tactic of commercial malware, and overwriting third-party affiliate IDs with your own - in the browser or any other HTTP stream - was a good way to get your product removed by antispyware applications. (Now, get off my lawn!)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Real geeks know that mplayer is still the One True Media Player for *nix. And we use it from the CLI and have our fave streams and playlists scripted.
Caveat Utilitor
The last time I made a serious attempt to use Linux as a main desktop machine I could not find a good mp3 player. Banshee was the best, but too buggy and the interface didn't feel right, sort of a knockoff of itunes which already has a pretty lousy interface. Nothing came close to WinAmp, which despite it's horrible crime of being Windows-only (though I guess it's moving to android too) is the best mp3 player I've ever used.
s/supply/repackaging an improved and differentiated version/
Anyway judging Canonical is irrelevant, they are free to do what they want and you are free to follow them or follow others or fork. Your document aren't hostages of canonical choices. That's the good thing of FOSS.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
You misquoted - you should have quoted the bit that you're actually complaining about:
'If you are a "real" linux user, uninstall Ubuntu.'
"Free" in Free Software does mean freedom, not "free of charge".
Open Source cannot force you to keep the affiliate code in the source (that is a string in the source that tells Amazon who referred the customer to them, so that it gets the 10% share). And it can be argued that the referral is from Ubuntu to Amazon instead of Banshee to Amazon. Who knows how many of those customers chose Ubuntu because of Banshee instead of the other way?
It occurred to me quite a few years ago that modern desktop environments and desktop toolkits (eg. GNOME, KDE, E17, Qt) are the equivalent of a DoS or brute force attack on ldd or any dynamic linker.
How many different index/db systems are there on a modern day OS? Wasn't an optimal one found about the time that computers evolved from a static memory registers to paged access? There is probably index circuitry in the memory chips themselves by now.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Many of them seem to be doing okay with selling support. It's not like there is a shortage of linux distros.
Just another reason to stick with Fedora.
lol
that kind of thinking drives you to debian with all the proprietry repositories turned off. totally free and unemcumbered and a right pain in the cunt to use as a desktop machine
or to be fair maybe that kind of thinking drives you away from ubuntu and towards linux mint (debian edition, of course). that's probably a good thing. LIFE TO LINUX MINT.
I find this incredibly ironic. It is no mistake that Free and Open software licences grant the moral right for recipients to modify their code as they see fit. It the the licences very reason for existing.
If the Banshee developers didn't want other people profiting off the code they should have released it (or the plugin if possible) under a non-commercial licence.
To grant someone a Free licence and then complain bitterly when someone has the temerity to use the rights intentionally granted therein seems like bad form to me.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Before everybody starts bashing Ubuntu (this is slashdot afterall), the article mentions that the analysts feel this is a better deal for gnome than what they had. Gnome now gets 25% of sales from Ubuntu One and Amazon. Not just for Banshee, but also Rhythmbox. From Amazon, Canonical is the affiliate and as such aren't required to give anything to Gnome for the use of Banshee or Rhythmbox.
Ubuntu may make mistakes in it's relationship with its partners, but in this case, it appears that they are being quite generous.
I don't use gnome, I use Ubuntu. Sure, Ubuntu happens to use gnome today-- but as Unity and Shell diverge, and Ubuntu adopts Qt, that's going to matter less and less. The fact of the matter is that if gnome was what I wanted to use and support, I'd use foresight-- and I don't. I like supporting Canonical-- I think they're taking the desktop in a better direction than the gnome foundation. *shrug* It may be more politically advantageous for them to stick to the Software Center for revenue though. Mark knows what he's doing, I'm sure they'll figure all that out. I'm not going to worry about it.
and how do you expect them to support themselves?
It was supposed to be by selling technical support and services tied to Ubuntu.
Obviously, that hasn't worked out too well. Neither has Canonical's efforts to get Ubuntu installed by OEM's
How many half-decent-sized OEMs are offering Ubuntu in a major way? None.
BTW, it was also Silber who is responsible for this latest decision:
Ubuntu's OEM game plan got blindsided by Android / Honeycomb, which makes their Unity offering look medieval. The shrinking netbook market also didn't help. Taking 75% of the revenue, when Novell contributed most of the work, and didn't take a penny ...
This mess has bad optics - it makes it look like Canonical is now scrounging for loose change in the couch.
Me.
I fully support OSS software, but you start in what those kind of comments and I'm done listening too you. It shows you to be an irrational fanboy with no grasp on the fact that it does take effort to produce software. The dollar amount to attach to it may be debatable but the effort part isn't, if you want to blatantly disregard it, or are too ignorant to recognize it, you aren't worth wasting my time.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
Ubuntu was really one of the first linux distro's targeting desktop environments that actually got it right. If it weren't for Ubuntu, we'd still be toying around with Fedora installations that don't include the wireless drivers or video adapters that are not recognized properly, or audio that doesn't work after the initial install. Wubi installer is awesome. People need to stop hating on companies just because they are trying to make a few bucks on the side (Apple already has a music store and rapes people into using it -- they make it next to impossible to download your own music and play it for free).
The Ubuntu project is also losing support from developers over these things. I quit the project when they added the Ubuntu One music store, started selling proprietary software through software center, and became a peddler for MPEG-4 patent licenses. Most of my friends who used to be Ubuntu members have since quit as well, none of us want to follow them down the dark path they're headed.
I should probably update the email address associated with my slashdot account.
Face it, Canonical has gone rogue.
If they can make a profit out of Debian then that would be something, don't you think? Otherwise its just charity from Shuttleworth.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I've never heard of Banshee. I suspect most people haven't. Now it will appear with every new Ubuntu 11.04 install.
What if the amount of money heading to Gnome (the 25% of Amazon's 10% kickback) is actually greater than the 100% Banshee has been donating? What if it's many times greater? What if this, in part, also means that Ubuntu gets to keep its doors open? What if folks made lots of Amazon purchases via Ubuntu's Banshee instead of inventing.... yet another ... reason to act like malcontents?
Canonical needs to figure out a business model that amounts to more than Shuttleworth’s good graces. There are no profitable desktop Linux desktop publishers. That is not a workable long term situation. In 2008 Canonical said Ubuntu had 3-5 years to get profitable. If the low end of that range means anything then Times Up! as they say..
"insane"... Slashdot's editorial judgement is actually regressing.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Mark Shuttleworth has gone off the deep end recently with a lot of his decisions for Ubuntu. Dropping Gnome for Unity, and in future even dropping X for Wayland. All in the name of some vague future usability bonus, but at the same time alienating a lot of software developers and Linux community members.
Granted, a lot of what Ubuntu has done has Ubuntu one of the most user friendly distros, and I think Mark Shuttleworth has been heavily influenced by Apple's OSX originally and iOS later on, with Shuttleworth being particularly enamoured of Steve Jobs' go it alone pioneering approach. This has garnered Ubuntu the biggest user base on Linux desktops, but it has now started to lead Ubuntu into territory where it stands to lose the support of those who matter, the developers.
Canonical has been making no profit ever since it came into existence, and that is probably a big irritation for Shuttleworth who probably had the idea that people would come running to his company for support services for the fantastic distro so they could use it professionally in their company's. Except it hasn't, at least not in any size enough to pay Canonical's bills and Shuttleworth still has his dream that he can get people to use Linux because it has a nice user friendly Desktop.
Canonical in general, and Shuttleworth in particular have messed it up because they couldn't get what really makes an OS popular: software. Instead of taking a more measured approach and working with those developers to get them to improve the uniformity and functionality of their software, he decided that he could do an iPhone/app store approach on the Linux community.
This is not going to end well.
And that is why Debian, as conservative as it is, will still be around after Ubuntu and Canonical have been forgotten about by most.
Scrounging for loose change indeed. Seems like Canonical is feeling the effect of a failed and lacing business plan, and start to get desperate. Hype does not generate revenue after all.
Do you mean butterfly's like this http://xkcd.com/378/
Cmon people, you do realise that Banshee uses Mono dont you?
'Improved' is a matter of perspective. It's been going downhill lately. Less innovation, more breakages with every release. Serious and glaring bugs going ignored for years on end. Tried to use 2-pass encoding with libx264 and ffmpeg on 10.xx recently? Known bug since 9.10 was released and completely ignored. And it's not a minor bug either, it's actually broken the pipelines of several production studios and marketing agencies I've dealt with, who have all had to switch distros now just to be able to do what they used to be able to do in earlier ubuntu versions. It's dying, we need to let it.
And it's easy to fix without changing lib or ffmpeg versions either.. it's just a miscompile. still they won't fix it for god knows what bureaucratic reasons..
Yep, that's the one.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
What we need is a scale of level of evil. Say 0 to 1 Microsoft (MS). So, IBM and Oracle would be about 0.25MS, Apple about 0.15MS, Google about 0.05MS. Where would this rate?? 0.001MS?
How's that "We are Ubuntu" thing going for you?
How much money are we looking at here? The banshee website say in 6 months they raised $3,077.00 through Amazon. http://banshee.fm/about/revenue/
The average Linux user doesn't pay for digital music.
If canonical is begrudging GNOME a few thousand dollars, i'd say they have some serious sustainability issues. If canonical wanted to hire a single dev it would definitely cost them more than than any Amazon store revenues.
Slackware.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
what with ditching gnome, focusing on their terrible ubuntu one, and now crap like this, I feel like Canonical is getting focused on the wrong kinds of things. Just another reason to be glad I jumped ship.
You're so full of shit. Libre is a superset of gratis when using those terms as FSF/OSI do to describe 'free' software. I'm a real Linux/Unix user, and I use Ubuntu for most of my needs. It's a good OS.
Canonical has every right to do what they're doing. If you don't like it, then go to another OS, fine. But don't compare them to Novell and CERTAINLY not Oracle! The OS is still libre-gratis-free, if it's in their main/universe repos. Don't FUD.
If your product is based on OSS, generously supporting OSS means you deliver a better product. It's fine to feed yourself first, but it's a mistake to eat it all. Gabriel Burt of Ubuntu indeed said it was a mistake.
By "many" you actually mean RedHat and SUSE. None of the other Linux distributions are anywhere near profitable.
M$ now stands for Mark Shuttleworth.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yeah, I was with Red Hat until they messed up the transition from Red Hat Linux to RHell (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
On the one hand you have the hell of years old versions of the enterprise version, and on the other the (perceived) instability of Fedora.
I thought Fedora was explicitly a testing vehicle. Has it been stable for you?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
TFS sucks, and the Banshee devs did not complain. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2013052&cid=35318196
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
As my main system to do everything on my pc, from dev to business. But it seems, i had done wrong.
What other distros are there to use for development, video, music, daily tasks etc ? centos ?
Read radical news here
Obviously, FLOSS licenses allow me to modify stuff. That's their whole point.
Still, I don't have to accept changes made by others as morally OK, fair or anything other than insane.
Strong-arming people into submission is one of the things I consider unacceptable. Period. It's bad enough that Apple, MS and, to some extent, Google, abuse this newfound gatekeeping status that is app stores and pre-installed software.
It's worse that Canonical wants to abuse the basically open system of Linux, once again.
I love Ubuntu, but I dont buy mp3s and will not do so with the new Ubuntu. I think the majority of (free) Ubuntu users are like me, and I dont think it is a good idea to rely on mp3s sales for revenues.
See the Magnatune blog. They sent a $614 check to GNOME, but Canonical's part is still waiting. The thing is that nowhere users are made aware of the fact that Canonical keep the cut for themselves, I had to stumble upon this article.
> GNOME would get _nothing at all_ from ubuntu users
It has been shown time and time again that humans prefer to default to having nothing over being treated unfairly. IMO, this is one of the strongest built-in social regulation tools our evolutionary path equipped us with.
It ensures that a majority will try to strive towards perceived(!) fairness.
That local customs, prejudices and whatnot influence this perception is a given.
someone told me, 20 years ago, that if you design an idiot-proof OS, then only idiots will use it. in this case, this is a good thing, because their bugreports are kept away from debian...
If you want to provide Upstart or other new GUI, then you must divert money from Gnome.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I am going back to Debian. I am not installing any thing that requires MS based patented technologies like C#.
Ubuntu just lost a lot of supporters.
the word "unreasonable" does not appear in TFA. citation needed!
I have to admit i'm not quite so keen on ubuntu as I once was. Maverick is not an option i dislike unity so I stuck with lucid which is pretty good and I will probably wait a while till canonical make a better release or perhaps I will look towards debian or mint. I kind of feel like I should have left Ubuntu behind and moved on but it is easy to stick with what I know.
What canonical seem to have done is taken their first apple like steps and I don' like it at all. Ubuntu doesn't really have an app store. Taking a cut from Amazon referral fee's away from gnome just sucks. to be honest the devs could spend it on crack and whores if they wanted too. Banshee is not Canonicals. Maybe they want to take a slice of firefox's revenues next after all you can run it on ubuntu and mozilla get revenue from google. UbuntuOne is canonicals baby and they can do as they please with that.
incidentally
You can cancel your account by doing the following:
1. Open https://one.ubuntu.com/account/
2. Click on the "View details or make changes" link
3. Click the "Cancel this subscription" link
4. Click the "Cancel subscription" button
I'm cancelling now. well I would be but apparently its down for maintenance. coincidence?
I'm not biased oracle is a lot worse but seriously Ubuntu seems to be acquiring people with poor people skills like a cat gets fleas.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Only if you are into the FSF type movement. Most people interpret "free software" as without-charge; i.e., what we would call freeware (as opposed to shareware).
The average person is not too concerned about having absolute "freedom" with their software, and aren't too concerned about Canonical's deals with Banshee, etc. Look at how popular MS became and how popular Apple is apparently becoming. That wasn't based on freedom of software, software sources, etc.
I'm totally cool with pushing for free-as-in-freedom ideals. But I don't think pushing for a complete/ideal/"pure" free-as-in-freedom software while trying to push users to go with Linux, generically, is going to work.
I personally use Linux. I don't care too much about Canonical's behavior; why? Because I didn't pay them any money. If I didn't pay anything, it's hard to claim I'm supporting them, in my view. Now, if I was purchasing something from them, I may care a bit more; but ultimately, since nobody and no company is perfect, it ends up being a lesser-of-evils choice. Amazon vs. Canonical? Apple vs. Microsoft? etc.
But the attitude of "you're not a "real" Linux user if you don't only use completely free-as-in-freedom software" simply portrays the "elite"/"real" Linux users as ... snarky elitists, I guess. I would advocate both; I personally think free/libre software is good, but I also realize that non-free can be good, can be a viable model, and can be done ethically. And you know what? If it helps out someone and makes their job easier, makes their hobbies easier, they find it easy to use, whatever, it's up to them if they want to buy it. I'm not going to say "ha! well you're not a REAL [insert something] user because you don't care about my arbitrary ideals!"
That attitude drives most people away. Movements don't tend to get anywhere if the movement is offensive, not in ideal, but in the way ideals are presented; a no-compromise either-you-are-100%-for-my-ideal-or-you're-not-even-a-friend attitude? Not sure that helps.
This is coming from an openoffice Google Microsoft Ubuntu SuSE Sabayon almost-Android Rhythmbox Amarok iTunes Chrome Firefox user. Currently typing on an Ubuntu 10.10 laptop, though. I say that not to show off my credentials, but to explain where I am coming from: I care less about the ideal than I do the software quality and usability, I guess... but there is some balance; e.g., I do like MS Office somewhat better than openoffice but I'm not willing to pay for it :)
I like the AC's comment below - "to real Linux users" ... hehe. Disagree, obviously, but it was funny...
You're right; I don't have much statistical support for the turning off. Most people I have talked to simply say Linux is too hard to use, too different, didn't work well, didn't play youtube videos, doesn't support their printer/iPod/whatever. Functional issues.
The attitude part? Well, I have to say, most people seem to have a "he's a fanatic" response to Stallman... in my admittedly anecdotal experience.
How about this argument: many people find that sort of attitude a turn-off in other aspects of life. Example? Politics. If you are a... conservative, we'll pick on them [since I am one :)], and you push for a pure ideal of conservatism and then also say that if you don't support pure, ideal conservatism, you aren't a real conservative? That's a turn-off to people who may be a bit more of a "moderate" conservative, or perhaps libertarian, etc. It's a divisive attitude. Unless we're talking about real moral issues, it seems most people aren't extreme in their ideals... and there are those who *are* extreme, as well, but who realize that most other people are not and it would be better to try to get some of what they think is better (say, free software ideals?) and slowly work towards it than insult those who think differently about it.
We have a funny relationship status on /. Friend of Friend and ...Foe of Friend? Friend of Freak? something like that... hehe.
How much can you buy for one percent? You don't have to like it, but Ubuntu is a very popular distro -- the most popular. This means that a percentage of Ubuntus user mass is worth more than a percent of a DSL or what have you. Apple takes 30% of everything that gets sold through their store. Microsoft, Google and everybody else does the same. Why is it so bad when Ubuntu takes a commission for their sales? GNOME will probably benefit from this, because up till now, Ubuntu has used Rhythmbox, which wouldn't provide _any_ money to GNOME.
Canonical/Ubuntu also rewrites the affiliate tag in the amazon search engine in Firefox That's also allowed by the license of Firefox. What is the opinion of people that are angry about the Banshee case in that case. In this case Firefox already get millions from all their windows installs and now Canonical gets some money from the Ubuntu install.
I won't be using Banshee anyway if it forces me to install mono.
... and she likes it. She's 83 years old. And everything works just fine. Just freakin fine. Wireless, sound, DVD burner. I've been evangelising Linux since 1997 and by god, Ubuntu is getting a lot of shit absolutely freaking perfect. And in the past 2 years, several of my non-tech friends are using it without any problems whatsoever.
Nobody is complaining that Banshee is FOSS or advocates that Canonical should not be allowed to modify the music store plugin.
However that doesn't make it the moral way to do.
The Banshee devs asked nicely to not modify the affiliate code in the plugin in order to support the GNOME Foundation (it's a comment in the source code). Canonical ignored that. It's not illegal but rude nonetheless.
Do you not see such a request is hypocritical?
The entire moral point of Free Software is that recipients of code are freed from whatever individual restraints a provider may otherwise put on them. To attempt to temper that freedom, even in the form of a "request", seems like a betrayal of Free Software values to me.
I would be fine with the plugin being non-Free if that was the authors desired but I do not like something being proclaimed as Free Software when the intent is clearly otherwise.
Free is Free. Free is not "Free-except-this-bit". Otherwise what other "polite" requests might devs make? Don't port this to Windows? Don't work on this code on the Sabbath?
For Free Software to work there can be no exceptions, people have to be able to trust that the moral rights allowed for in the licence are universal and absolute.
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Do you not see such a request is hypocritical?
No. It's a nice request, not a condition.
Free is Free. Free is not "Free-except-this-bit".
It is still Free. Nobody is suing Canonical over this.
Canonical is, however, getting bad press and rightfully so, especially after Mark Shuttleworth himself claims to defends to be respectful to FOSS developers.
Otherwise what other "polite" requests might devs make? Don't port this to Windows? Don't work on this code on the Sabbath?
Why do you make those whacko requests up?
It's a polite request to donate money to charity. Banshee is not a 1st party GNOME application, yet the developers decided philanthropically to create that Amazon store plugin and donate everything to a non-profit foundation. Especially someone who releases an OS called "humanity towards others" should understand this.
It's not like Canonical changed the charity, eg. giving all the generated revenue to projects fighting child starvation or so.
Canonical simply puts 75% of the money into its own pockets without doing nothing in return. It's not like Canonical is even developing Banshee. Banshee is developed by Novell (who has no problem with giving all the money to the foundation) and volunteers.
For Free Software to work there can be no exceptions, people have to be able to trust that the moral rights allowed for in the licence are universal and absolute.
A license is for legal rights, not for moral rights.
In an apparently futile attempt to get you to consider the general principle. If you view those requests a whacko, can you explain how the Banshee request is different? I wonder how many lines of Free/Open code you'd have to trawl through to find a "request" not to modify like the one in the Banshee code. I reckon you'd be looking a long time because it simply does not fit with the freedoms associated with Free/Open software. It is incongruent and strange (or whacko, if you will).
That is completely wrong. Licenses do not pop out of thin air because someone was bored. They come about because the moral rights (eg the four software freedoms) that people wish to support can only be given strength through legal protection. They are a legal expression of a moral position.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
In an apparently futile attempt to get you to consider the general principle. If you view those requests a whacko, can you explain how the Banshee request is different?
I already did: Banshee's request would benefit a charity. Canonical is not a charity. Helping charities is always good, helping corporations at the expense of charities is always bad (even though often legal).
That is completely wrong. Licenses do not pop out of thin air because someone was bored. They come about because the moral rights (eg the four software freedoms) that people wish to support can only be given strength through legal protection. They are a legal expression of a moral position.
So when the GPLv2 was released in 1991, the authors did think about TiVoization, DRM, and web apps?
No, they didn't. So by today's rules, the GPLv2 has various loopholes that were not intended. Exploiting those loopholes is legal but not moral.
GPL developers usually assume the following: "I give you the source but if you use and modify it, give the changes back."
Nowadays GPL software is used in web apps and the modifications are never given back because the apps are technically not distributed (one case that comes to mind is the Meebo web-bases chat client and its use of Pidgin's source code or Google's secret modifications of Linux' kernel source code for Google's server farm).
If today consciously decide to release software under GPLv2 the probably know about the loopholes and decided to accept them. But 1990's developers never consciously decided in favor of the loopholes. They simply weren't aware of them and exploiting them now is immoral.
The GPL has a non-binding preamble. The preamble states the morals behind the license. In today's world the preamble is violated in so many cases, you can't even count them but the actual legally binding part of the GPL(v2) is only violated seldom.
Banshee's source code comment "Please help support Free Software through the GNOME Foundation!" is like a preamble: Non-binding but following it is the moral thing to do.
So in other words there is something special about this case that makes it an exception to general rules. You are of course entitled to the opinion but such arbitrary exceptions are not a recipe for a healthy environment. People must be able to trust that the licence means says otherwise it's a recipe for discord (like this!). You may consider it "worthy" but there is no reason someone else's desires (like the ones I mooted as hypotheticals) couldn't equally be considered worthy by someone of an appropriate mindframe. I suggest that the lack of such arbitrary requests in the expansive base of Free (or open) software is a strong indicator that there is good reason to wonder if they are right or reasonable.
But the freedom to change code as you see fit is not a loophole. It is the licences very raison d'etre. For the GPL example the changes remain consistent to the moral rights it seeks to legally enforce, ie to grant recipients and users of the covered code the four freedoms. The loophole closed is not a right accidently granted, it is a right that has The Banshee request cannot be seen in the same light as it clearly acts counter to the intent of the licence. There is a moral inconsistency there, an attempt to take back something that has been explicitly granted. Free software must be free of such arbitrary restraints otherwise it is not free software.
I would have no problem with the Banshee developers using a non-commercial license if they wanted to, but it is not reasonable to claim to be under a free licence at the same time as seeking to add a specific restriction to the range of legitimate (if not legal) changes some can make.
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