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

[hairyfeet]

Which just proves what I've been saying, there is no money to be made in Linux desktops. Canonical will join the ranks of Corel, Linspire, Xandros, Mandriva, and more we have forgotten in the list of failed Linux desktop business ventures.

In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users. Windows server can cost many thousands of dollars when you figure in the CALs and depending on what features you need, Windows desktops are $100 for Home and $140 for Pro, and a hell of a lot lower than that for OEMs. At numbers that low you have to get huge economies of scale going to pay for the developers, the lights, the building, but its a catch-22 because you can't make money until you get huge economies of scale but you can't survive long enough to get the huge economies of scale because the money runs out.

As I said here more than 2 years ago when Shuttleworth announced he would sink no more millions into Canonical that it was over and now we have the final nail. Look at their history since the Shuttleworth announcement...Ubuntu Netbook (trying to get into the netbook craze after the ship had sailed), selling search results to Yahoo, selling MP3s through Amazon, trying to get into the server business after Shuttleworth talking about how Ubuntu was gonna be "the desktop Linux" for the masses, trying to come up with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu TV...their entire history since that announcement has been that of a desperate company trying to find SOME way, any way, to stem the flow of red ink and find a positive revenue stream.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again...Linux on the server, the embedded space? There is money to be made there. as far as Linux on the phone it would be hard to see how Google is gonna make back their billion dollars a year development costs but of course Google wants as many eyeballs as possible so hard to know what their monetary strategy is, but on the desktop? Sorry, not gonna happen, as Shuttleworth found out it costs millions to make and support a Linux desktop and there is just no money there to be made, this is one area where being "free as in beer" hurts more than it helps.

Final prediction? Canonical joins the other dead Linux desktops in a year and a half, maybe sooner. All those based on Ubuntu better be switching to Debian as a base NOW because it won't be much longer before Shuttleworth pulls the plug and hits the lights on his way out. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a month or two he has it up for sale just to try to recoup some of the money, doubt there will be any takers though, just no money in desktops.

Re:I see

[TwilightXaos]

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

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Ya know I just have to say...I find this all VERY enlightening.

I mean here we have a company that was the darling of the community, who heaped praise upon it, yet when they are bleeding to death and trying to try to survive what does the community do? "ZOMFG block it!" or "I'm going somewhere else, how dare they try to keep the doors open!" and it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer".

For a site that supposedly has so many libertarians you'd think TINSTAAFL wouldn't even have to be said, hell the history of the company since Shuttleworth stopped the gravy train has been one of desperation, even unity was an attempt to get an Ubuntu tablet, yet the nerd rage here at Canonical trying to keep the lights on is just incredible.

But I don't think anyone will have to worry for much longer, the era of "Linux for humans" that was Canonical is nearly over. When the community refuses to buy shit and blocks everything the check from Amazon won't even be enough to pay their phone bill. So long Canonical, it was a nice idea, too bad you can't make money on free desktops.

Enough Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm switching to Linux... oh wait

Re:Enough Microsoft!

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

What surprised me from reading TFS was that Ubuntu only has 12.10 users.

Easily disabled

[drinkypoo]

I too am offended to be getting advertisements by default. But thankfully, they are trivial to remove. FTFA,

Removing Shopping Results from Unity

Much like the Amazon and Ubuntu One Music web-apps you can disable the âShoppingâ(TM) feature easily.

Just open up a terminal and run:

        sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

You forgot the other ones. You need to remove the video and music lenses which pull info from YouTube, Google, and others, otherwise you will be querying those businesses even if you are just trying to search your own computer for content. It's a form of spyware.

Also having to remove crapware you don't want after you install something was an often-heard compaint about Windows. I'd rather not have it be on Linux now too.

Canonical: You're getting your morals turned around. Community should come before money. Forget what the spirit of Ubuntu was supposed to represent?

Dash

[Halo1]

Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash

I hope I'm not the only one that got visions of a /etc/profile spewing out Amazon commercials when reading the above.

Re:Adbuntu

[Knuckles]

I wonder how long until someone releases a tool to disable the ads.

Big deal. sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping. Or for the GUI, open Ubuntu Software Center, search for, e.g., "shop". Click "Show technical items" and uninstall the lens. That could be made a bit more obvious, but it's not like what you are implying.

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.

Adbuntu

[flyingfsck]

Adbuntu, the consumer friendly distribution.

Re:The nerd rage around here is unbelievable

[multiplexo]

Canonical have provided the community with a polished and free OS

Free yes, polished? Are you fucking kidding me? I can tell that you've never used Ubuntu for any serious server work. If you had you'd know that it's anything but polished. Take the Upstart init manager as an example. In theory Upstart was supposed to replace the old SYS V init scripts with a leaner, event driven mechanism for system start up. In practice it has done anything but. Some services start through Upstart, some start through init.d and others, such as sshd have different behavior depending upon whether or not you control them via upstart or start and stop them via init.d. Then there's the fact that the braindead dildos who wrote Upstart set it up so that it kills services via kill -9. Yeah, because nothing bad could ever happen if you ran kill -9 to shut your database down, which is exactly what Upstart does when you run

stop mysql

Apparently no one at Canonical understands that "kill -9" is something that you use only as a last resort and certainly isn't something you want to use when you're stopping and starting a database. Then there's the piece of shit Plymouth boot manager. Guess what, servers don't need splash screens. Really, they don't. My servers live in remote sites or are hosted in the cloud. I don't need a cutesy picture when they start, I want screen after screen of detailed output telling me what the system is doing. But go ahead and try to remove Plymouth from your Ubuntu system. Guess what! You can't. Some useless son-of-a-crack-whore set up the package dependencies such that attempting to remove Plymouth, which is a real piece of shit from an Ubuntu system also removes the core system.

Then there's ureadahead. Ureadahead is an OK idea on laptops I guess but does nothing for you when you're on a server and I've started disabling it on the systems I run. Interestingly enough despite ureadahead's supposed performance benefits I haven't seen any penalty for doing so. I could go on and on and on, the out of date rsyslog that ships with Ubuntu (yeah, because collecting log information is boring and old school, who needs that stuff?), bugs in mdraid that cause it to incorrectly detect disk size when it creates your disk label, thus creating a ticking time bomb that can go off and result in massive file corruption, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and the Ubuntu desktop, what a piece of shit. I'd take Windows XP over this POS any day of the week. Newsflash Ubuntu developers, larding your desktop up with shiny crap doesn't make it more useful. The Gnome and Unity UIs are every bit as bloated and stupid as the Windows Vista UI and if any real functionality or value has been added I have yet to see what it is. Gnome and Unity are nothing more than a shiny coat of paint on top of a nasty, stinky turd.

About a year ago I set up a desktop using straight Debian, and it was fucking amazing. Shit just worked and I realized that the only reason why Ubuntu has been able to stay in business so long is because they've been able to ride on Debian's coat tails and that even though they're idiots they haven't been able to fuck up the solid work that the folks at Debian have done over the years. This cartoon describes Ubuntu best.

http://www.xkcd.com/424/#