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Canonical To Divert Money From GNOME

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-now-nobody's-happy dept.

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."

4 of 374 comments (clear)

  1. Last straw that broke the camel's back by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  2. Ubuntu One is Hosted by Amazon by Skystrider · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/
    1. Re:Ubuntu One is Hosted by Amazon by pavon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Canonical modified the version of Banshee that it ships with Ubuntu to use their own Amazon affiliate code instead of Banshee's everytime a purchase is made. This is perfectly legal, since anyone can modify Banshee's source code. However, it is pretty shady IMHO; no better than the people that slap another name on OSS and try to sell it to unknowing consumers.

  3. Re:Flamebait by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Two facts:
    1. The Banshee developers were not taking a penny. All revenue was being donated to GNOME. So this is not a "win" for the devs in any shape or form, but it IS a loss for GNOME.
    2. Novell sponsored a lot of the development. Looks like they practice the concept of "Ubuntu" (humanity towards others) better than Canonical does.