Linux Mint Diverting Banshee Revenue

LinuxScribe writes "According Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre, the popular Linux Mint distribution has changed the Amazon.com affiliate code for the Banshee music player so that Mint, not Canonical or the GNOME Foundation, will receive the revenue from MP3 sales through Banshee. Though a trivial amount of money ($3.41 in November 2011), Linux Mint's actions still raise the question: how should revenue be shared between upstream and downstream FLOSS projects?"

Comments

wuh

[masternerdguy]

Revenue? In my Linux? It's more likely than you think.

Simple

[Kjella]

A dollar for me, one for you, one for me, one for.... oh well, here's 41 cents at least.

Re:Simple

[galaad2]

One for me, one for you. One, two for me, two for you. One, two, three for me, three for you...

i think that's might be the official RIAA/MPAA accounting method.

Find a better case for the discussion

[SplatMan_DK]

Though a trivial amount of money ($3.41 in November 2011)

Trivial? No shit!

Seriously: find a better case for this discussion. Arguing over less than 4 bucks is going to make everyone involved seem petty and small-minded.

- Jesper

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[Anonymous Coward]

A petty and small minded internet debate about software freedom? That's unpossible!

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[icebraining]

This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[tomhudson]

First, if you had actually RTFA, you'd know that they've offered the Banshee developers a better revenue-sharing deal than Ubuntu did ... and they're not saying "take it or leave it or we'll say 'screw you' and disable it entirely" like Ubuntu did when people complained.

Second, affiliate marketing must DIE DIE DIE! Kill it off, and you get rid of a LOT of spam.

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[fwarren]

This has EVERYTHING to do with software freedom. Per the GPL what they are required to do once they make their change to the affiliate link is make the source code available.

End of Story.

GPL covers copyright law, not ethics and the human heart. I can download RedHat and recompile with all references to RedHat removed and use Charlie Chaplin and call it the I-Hate-Chaplin distro. Does not matter if that is nice or ethical, What it is, is allowable by the GPL.

I think any downstream project has the right to change the revenue stream stuff. As far as I am concerned it is like a TV Commercial, there is a *posibility* that it will lead to revenue, not a guarantee. The only thing they have to do is make the source code available. Beyond that, I would say if there is a graphic or text that says donations, or purchases go back to the project, that stuff should be removed or changed to reflect who it is going to. if it is not mentioned at all, then "Mint" and anyone else is free to do what they want.

The current situation is interesting enough. What happens if the upstream affiliate code is out of date or broke? What if it causes the software to throw errors? Is it still sacred at that point?

It would be "nice" if no one ever hijacked the link. It would be "nice" if they shared revenue. But they are not required to. RMS put nothing in the software freedoms about not tampering with upstream revenue. Being a dick is showing a picture of Jerry's Kids and saying that all purchases via the music store for the month of January will go to MDA and in reality you are just pocketing the money yourself. Modifying links in the source code is what downstream projects do. Deal with it.

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[moderatorrater]

Do you know how much free and open source software that would buy?

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[Enry]

I do spend a bit of time making sure my thoughts are down properly. Too many comments that come out wrong because I wrote faster than I thought. Also had to wait for the preview to come up, make sure I didn't type anything wrong.

And no, I don't make $289/hour, but I do make a pretty decent amount. Meaning I should get back to work.

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[fwarren]

Well then if we are talking ethics why are we running Mint anyways?

• Questionable leagal status of codecs
• Questionable if we should include flash since the end user did not accept the license agreement
• They already use affilate links for search
• Clem has made anti-semantic remarks

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[msauve]

Per the GPL what they are required to do once they make their change to the affiliate link is make the source code available.

We're not talking about what they are required to do, but what they should do.

What they should do, is turn around and submit their change upstream.

Re:Find a better case for the discussion

[icebraining]

Maybe you should ask that question to Brian Proffitt (the author of the article), since the question was asked by him. From TFA:

But did the Linux Mint team do the right thing by appropriating the affiliate revenue for themselves?

Personally, I would just like to suggest that maybe there's more to ethics than having legal permission.

Control?

[wisnoskij]

I am confused?
Why would they have control of that in the first place?
If Mint owns Banshee, and Canonical and GNOME do not, then they should get the revenue.
And if they are able to change the code then does that non demonstrate that they have the right to?
And even if money should be shared with those other two, if Mint is the primary owner would it not make sense for it all to go to them and then they split it up themselves.

Re:Control?

[Omnifarious]

Just because something is legal does not mean it is socially desirable behavior. I wouldn't choose to legally prevent them from changing the code in this way, but that isn't the question. The question is, is it polite to do so? Are they being rude?

Classic big business blunder. It's legal, and it increases our profit, so it must be the right thing to do.

Re:Control?

[DarKnyht]

Isn't this what Open Source code is about. You put the code out there and allow anyone to tinker with it, as long as they give the tinkered code away? I could download Linux Mint's version and program it to deposit all proceeds into my bank account and make my own Distro called "Make me $0.50 Linux" and as long as I offer my code changes up, there is little that can be done.

Re:Control?

[DRJlaw]

Just because something is legal does not mean it is socially desirable behavior. I wouldn't choose to legally prevent them from changing the code in this way, but that isn't the question. The question is, is it polite to do so? Are they being rude?

Answer #1. No. Answer #2. No.

Here's another question: Is it socially desirable behavior to impose 'social obligations' which directly contradict the terms and conditions of the license selected by an author of the program?

Bertrand Lorentz : That being said, my position on this subject hasn't changed, and the
following text from the code comments is still valid :
We ask that no one change this redirect URL. ALL (100%) revenue
generated by this Banshee Amazon integration is sent directly to the
non-profit GNOME Foundation.

MIT license:Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do
so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

Pick a different license. Don't hide the ball. Don't explicity grant permission to do something and then complain when someone does it. That is socially undesireable behavior. If you can write complex computer code but can't figure out how to create a custom license rather than burying a contradictory comment within the source, that verges upon being rude.

Let the users choose...

[Anonymous Coward]

really, would it be that hard to let users choose?

Re:Let the users choose...

[gigne]

If I had mod points...

"Thanks for running Banshee... From time to time online transactions generate a small amount of commission.
Where would you like any proceeds to go to:
      [ ] Canonical
      [ ] Mint
      [X] Cancer Research Charity
      [ ] A.N Other Charity
"

Re:Let the users choose...

[Squiggle]

Exactly. The only sane way to resolve conflicts like this is to let the users choose (and provide smart defaults).

By "smart" I mean something that doesn't disadvantage any of the choices.... off the top of my head, an interface something like the Humble Bundle, perhaps equal or random distribution of money to start and randomize the order of choices. Then record (anonymously) the choices of anyone who adjusts the defaults and start setting the defaults according to general community preference once enough samples are taken. That can be gamed, but it seems like too much work for *way* too little gain. :)

Re:Let the users choose...

[fwarren]

It is also common knowledge that most people do not purchase their music via Banshee.

Since most folks will never purchase music this way, there is not much point in them being concerned in who gets the revenue.

They deserve it

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux Mint 12 made GNOME3 usable. They deserve the $3.41.

Re:They deserve it

[MBGMorden]

Linux Mint 12 made GNOME3 usable.

That they did, but it was still buggy as hell for me. I'm still running Linux Mint but I'm on MATE for now. Thankfully thought, I can at least see that Mint's extensions at least take Gnome3 in a direction that I can agree with, once a few more of the issues are ironed out.

At a minimum, Linux Mint seems to be at least TRYING to cater to their users, as opposed to Ubuntu and Gnome who just keep plowing ahead tell the entire userbase that they're wrong.

Re:They deserve it

[kestasjk]

As long as $0.27 goes to X.Org, those guys do great work.

Re:They deserve it

[serviscope_minor]

We'll come back to this when Wayland becomes usable.

Or, we'll come back to it when Wayland gets adopted and removes so many of the nice features that X11 users have been enjoying since 1987.

Re:They deserve it

[serviscope_minor]

Wayland is the way of the future.

It has futuristic things like:
* No network transparency!
* Client side window decorations! This will offer the following futuristic features:
    * Every toolkit providing subtly different window decorations
    * Hung applications have immovable windows which get in the way and make life suck, like other popular operating systems
    * Impossible to use a decoration free tiling window manager to maximize screenspace
    * Impossible to use a window manager which adds useful extra window decorations and functions
* And apparently, endless arguments about how copy/paste should work.

But hey, at least it will provide a much needed performance boost for those of us still stuck on a Sun 3/60. Also, the .1ms latency introduced by a compositing window manager has really been bugging me recently.

Re:They deserve it

[serviscope_minor]

Could you please name them?

Sure: network transparency is 1. I find it much better than your experiences, personally. It depends on having well written programs of course. The best fix would be to adopt an X12 protocol which puts proper font rendering back in the server and modifies the features which cause high latency. NX client is heavily based on X, but is the best remote GUI system available by a wide margin.

The second is flexibility in window managers. The geniuses in charge of Wayland seem to be trying to do client side window decorations. That kills flexibility and also makes hung programs hang around in a really annoying manner.

Re:They deserve it

[Bert64]

X11 is not the problem, the video drivers are...
SGI machines were supporting multi head high speed setups using X11 in the days before x86 machines could even support multi head at all.

Re:They deserve it

[serviscope_minor]

Not in the project's scope - Wayland is a display server; it makes sure that crap in memory buffers wind up on the screen in the correct order. You can always run an X server to get your network transparency (this is, after all, how Wayland is first going to be used).

Sigh. No. Wayland's stated goal is to replace X. See for instance talks by the main authors about "Life after X". People are now making toolkits that target Wayland directly. History shows that if network transparency is not built into a windowing syatem from the beginning then it will suck. Dodging the issue by claiming it is not within the scope will not make the final result suck any less.

Not necessaroly

How did you work that out?

Hung applications have immovable windows which get in the way and make life suck, like other popular operating systems

Use your brain. If applications are responsible for decorating windows and therefore generating their own move/iconify requests, then a hung application won't respond. Just like hoe huing applications have immovable windows on OSX and Windows.

Impossible to use a decoration free tiling window manager to maximize screenspace
Impossible to use a window manager which adds useful extra window decorations and functions

[citation needed]

Again use your brain. If the application draws the decorations, how will the window manager augment them or completely change them without resorting to awful bodgery?

Clipboard functionality is not trivial to implement in a robust and interoperable fashion. Copying and pasting is, for the time being, still hacked and duct-taped together under all major Unix desktops.

[citation needed]

Actually, you're talking rubbish. I have implemented copy/paste in xlib which interoperates with every program and datatype I tested it with. The X11 copy/paste mechanism is actually really sensible and well designed. It goes something like this:

Prog 1: I have the clipboard!
Prog 2: I want to paste.
Prog 1: Well, I can offer you this list of datatypes which are now mostly MIME types
Prog 2: Excellent. I'll have image/jpeg, please.
Prog 1: OK, then. Here you go.

That's basically it. There are some minor wrinkles, like the "here you go" part having a mechanism for chunking the data so the server doesn't have to hold it all, and programs don't have to do special things to avoid hanging with large pastes over slow networks. But basically, it's simple, robust and effective. It's also sufficiently flexible that XDnD was added without any server or API changes, just using existing mechanisms. And it's also sufficiently flexible to allow the sort of persistent clipboards which exist on other operating systems, which work as follows:

Prog 1: I have the clipboard. ... same negotiation as above ...
Clipboard manager: Gimme everything.
Prog 1: OK.
Clipboard manager: I have the clipboard! I can offer ALL THESE datatypes...

Again, simple, ffective and robust.

It's going to bring internal overhead to a minimum, by letting the kernel manage the hardware, take care of double-buffering and minimize the amount of work needed to actually draw anything - have you ever actually tried to write an X application?

Yes. I've spent more time messing around with Xlib than with toolkits.

You could also try taking a look at smspillaz's blog, where he regularly pulls his hair out over some brain-dead functionality or unexpected race-condition and deadlocks caused by X..

That's curious. Given that X11 is single threaded, I wonder how he gets race conditions. I've never found one.

Oh, and it's still not possible to get vsync working on a multi-monitor setup (and not even all single-monitor setups) under X.

Works for me. The problem with more than one monitor is when they run at different refresh rates. There's nothing inherent in X which makes it any le

Re:They deserve it

[TheRaven64]

A better approach would be to move something like Cairo to the server, so you could upload bezier paths and reference them by name (actually, just arbitrary snippets of PDF data would be ideal, but then you've practically reinvented Quartz). The problem with uploading 'fonts' is that you need to specify a font format. Most fonts these days will be in TrueType format, or maybe OpenType format, but PDFs embed PostScript fonts (type 1, 2, or 3...), DVIs use MetaFont, and so on. You're requiring the display server to have a complex font parser (see the recent Windows security hole and various past *NIX ones for why this is a bad idea) and you're limiting the kind of fonts that can supported.

If you just provide the glyphs to the server and then composite them there then you only use a small amount of bandwidth to render each one. The current approach means that you need to send them again if you render at a different size, but that's not a huge use of bandwidth - you're still typically only sending a couple of dozen monochrome glyph masks per font / size. Sending them as a simple vector representation (e.g. PostScript bezier drawing commands) would be more efficient, but not by much.

That said, if I were redesigning X11, I'd replace the entire drawing system with something that let you send PDF objects that would be referenced by a unique ID (as they are in a PDF file, in fact) and composited wherever they were required.

Nothing really

[ewanm89]

Okay, lets simplify this for all that don't want to read the articles.
Banshee's own link is dead so Canonical replaced it with their own in Ubuntu.
When Linux MINT saw this in the changelogs while repackaging, they did the same thing replacing it with their own.

I'm sure both would change this back if Banshee upstream started accepting donations again.

Re:Nothing really

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the article, the link is not dead (even though Mint thought it was). It just works only from within Banshee.

Kids argue over 3,41

[SplatMan_DK]

This has nothing to do with software freedom. It's not a question of whether Mint should have the right to do it, but whether they are jerks or not by doing it.

Perhaps, but my original comment still stands in that case.

In my book nobody is a "jerk" if the amount involved is 3,41 USD - unless children under the age of 7 are involved.

- Jesper

Re:Kids argue over 3,41

[marcello_dl]

> Nobody's arguing over the $3.14

you kinda "rounded" the amount.
3,41 dollars: that's gangsta.

Re:Kids argue over 3,41

[atisss]

He actually rounded more, as it was supposed to be $3.141592..

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's free software.

[tepples]

Because they don't have the right?

It's free software. They have the right to make whatever changes they intercoursing want as long as the end user gets the source code and the right to modify and redistribute it.

Re:It's free software.

[icebraining]

That's legal right. There are others.

Re:It's free software.

[chuckinator]

Legal rights are the only ones with teeth unless you can drum up a torch-and-pitchfork-bearing mobs.

They Don't Need It

[Greyfox]

They're making a mint!

Who cares?

[AntEater]

The folks writing Banshee released it with a Free license of their own free will. As long as Mint or Canonical or whoever complies with the terms of the license, what difference does it make? It's not like the little commission was part of the license agreement. If Mint wants to repackage Banshee as "The Banshee Sucks" media player and send all income from it to support Alfred E. Newman for president, it's their business.

Re:Who cares?

[Requiem18th]

More importantly, who cares about Banshee? Okay I know a lot do since it's popular but I can't seriously understand why would you want a media player running on mono with the slugginess that such implies, with silly album galleries that hardly match the way we listen to music today and that pointlessly tries to also manage video file without actually making the commitment to being a media center.

The album galleries drive me crazy, this is almost as bad as the physical bookshelf in the iPad. Music players these days are search based *because* it was realised that music can be grouped into more categories than what physical disc they were published in. The files don't need to be in an specific hierarchy nor in the same computer any more.

Yet that doesn't make for pretty thumbnails, and because everything must be thumbnails banshee presents music in little graphical boxes with a thumbnail of a CD case that you probably don't have, successfully reproducing the experience of browsing a physical music library from 1995 in 2011!

I have my complains about Rhythmbox but exactly what has Banshee (or Exaile) that Rhythmbox doesn't?

Excerpt from changelog

[donscarletti]

Did anyone take a gander at the changelog?

         // We ask that no one change this redirect URL. ALL (100%) revenue
         // generated by this Banshee Amazon integration is sent directly to the
         // non-profit GNOME Foundation.
-        public const string REDIRECT_URL = "http://integrated-services.banshee.fm/amz/redirect.do/";
+        public const string REDIRECT_URL = "http://redir.linuxmint.com/mp3amazonstore/";

Wow, blatantly doing exactly the opposite of what the authors have kindly asked and redirecting funds to themselves. Completely within the terms of the GPL, completely within the bounds of what makes someone scum. I've heard the complaint that Ubuntu always takes from the ecosystem and never gives back, but this is cold, even for them. Well, this is a kick in the face for anyone who said that you can make money through making open source software, nomatter how you think of sharing your code while still covering your costs, someone's just going to rebrand it.

Apologies for my message looking terrible, I switched on slashdot's "code" format, I promise not to do it again.

Woah...

[DeeEff]

People still BUY music!?

Whatever happened to that confunded P2P thing that everyone was crazy about a couple years back?

I'm just shocked

[ThatsNotPudding]

everyone doesn't use the Swiss Army Knife of media players: VLC. It wouldn't shock me much if that program could make a spreadsheet sing a tune.

Re:Alright, I take that one

[Alex Belits]

Don't forget to pay for the whole time Westerners used Arab technology "al-Jabr" (you know it under a very similar sounding name).