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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sorry, I was sleeping. Now that I'm awake to see this story, I am here!
Ubuntu has already bundled software that uses Mono with Ubuntu when there is a perfectly good substitute, tomboy notes. It can be replaced with gnote, which is a port of tomboy to C++. Sometimes they also bundle F-Spot, for which numerous good substitutes exist (gthumb, anyone?) Meanwhile Rhythmbox does everything Banshee does, including supporting iPods and MTP devices.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Question:How EXACTLY do you expect Canonical to pay for the serious R&D required to bring Ubuntu up the the levels of OSX, iOS, and Windows 7 in ease of use?
First, going by past performance, I don't expect Canonical to pay for any "serious R&D". They haven't been able to get any serious traction with OEMs, despite this being where most of their resources go, so there goes their dream of OEM support contracts, and the revenue from them to fund development.
Second, an example of what they consider "serious R&D" - the Unity interface - was a total waste of time. Compare it with Android/Gingerbread, and ask yourself which of the two an OEM or an end user is going to want. Unity is DOA. Then again, Unity's original target - the netbook - is also shrinking.
Third, both Redhat and Novell spend money on improving the desktop. Redhat sells Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Novell sells Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop.
Fourth, Ubuntu doesn't spend real money fixing bugs. That's why their upstream code contributions are almost non-existent. And why every release breaks stuff - they make things incompatible with upstream, then wonder why nobody wants their code, and why updates break. This is not sustainable in the long term.
Fifth, Ubuntu can't seem to make a profit from their cloud offering. Heck, even their music store is just a skinned rebranded 3rd-party music store, hosted by Amazon.
Sixth, Ubuntu has the wrong people. I was floored when Matt Asay posted that once he was hired by Canonical, he started using linux, and liked it. WT****?!? Sure enough, he didn't even last out the year. Another "triumph" of marketing over substance.
Ubuntu is mostly hype and noise. The world will probably be a better (or at least quieter) place when it dies.
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 :)