Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed

An anonymous reader writes "Scheduled to be released next month, Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash and by default an Amazon store in the user's launcher. The reason for these 'features'? Affiliate revenue. Despite previous controversies with Banshee and Yahoo, Canonical is 'confident it will be an interesting and useful feature for our 12.10 users.' But are the 'users' becoming products?" Update: 09/22 19:35 GMT by T : Reader bkerensa scoffs, calling the Amazon integration unobtrusive, and says objections to its inclusion in the OS should be ignored, "because in reality ads will not be found in 12.10 unless you are seeing them on a third party website you go to in a web browser." He's got screenshots.

Comments

I see

[Anonymous Coward]

Mass migration in 3...2...1...

Re:I see

[rubycodez]

you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless

stick a fork in Canonical, they are done

Re:I see

[TwilightXaos]

This is Linux. Distro is a proper subset of Settings.

Honestly not that bad

[TechieRefugee]

It really isn't. I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations. And, as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI, I won't really complain about it. Besides, there's always other flavors of Ubuntu which may have the ad feature removed.

Re:Profit!

[Samantha Wright]

I don't want to scare you, but there are already dozens of those.

But are the 'users' becoming products?

[overshoot]

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

This has very obviously been Microsoft's business model for operating systems from the very beginning: they don't sell the OS to you, they sell you to the OEMs.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[betterunixthanunix]

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

I do not pay for this:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.

He who pays, owns.

[goodmanj]

This is not just annoying, it's the beginning of the end of Ubuntu as free software. No matter how unobtrusive the ads are, if Amazon is paying Ubuntu, Ubuntu is bound to become dependent on that cash stream, which means Amazon controls what happens to Ubuntu. And Amazon has shown little interest in the future of free software.

Now, this isn't entirely a new thing: companies like IBM and Google have been paying for Linux development (in the form of hiring Linux developers) for years. But when an entire distro is financially captured by the biggest online retailer on the planet... that's something new.

ubuntu forgets the one thing

[rubycodez]

all the people who run it, but never paid, are not "freeloaders", they are the massive user base that gave the Ubuntu distro momentum and pushed it to the top of linux distros. they got it into the corporate workplace (my employer uses Ubuntu), they make the helpful forum posts, etc.

your monetizing needs to be done outside of those people, it's done with services, support, add-ons for the corporate environment, etc.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[couchslug]

It's Linux.

You can disable any adverts easily, and run the WM of your choice WITHOUT switching distros.

You aren't stuck with defaults as you are with Windows.

Unity's pretty good

[Compaqt]

I thought that all features (which use compositing) weren't enabled when you used a VM. Maybe it would have been different if you tried it on a separate partition on the bare metal.

Anyway, as a non-noob user (developer) I'm here to say that Unity as of 12.04 is pretty good for power users and developers.

From my perspective, Unity is pretty good for multitasking workflows. In the earlier versions, Unity was useless for multiple workspaces because you could basically only have one copy of a program usefully running.

In the current version, there are indicators that tell you if one copy of a program is running, or two, or more. And if it's on the current workspace or not.

Although I had thought that I would hate it, it's actually pretty good, because 95% of the time you want to work with the apps, files, and programs you were most recently working with. Also, the Alt+Tab and Alt+` works well. They're basically integrated together so you can move out of one mode to the other (once you're in Alt+Tab or Alt+` mode, try using the arrow keys).

Also, one misapprehension I had about Unity was that youd have a huge number of icons down the left side. But since you only have one icon per program (instead of per window), it's not bad.

Finally, you should install Cardapio. It gives you a hierarchical (organized by category) menu of applications so you don't have to know the name of app before you search for it (a major complaint about Unity).