
Canonical to take 75% of Banshee Amazon Sales - Newky
http://gburt.blogspot.com/2011/02/canonicals-new-plan-for-banshee.html
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cookiecaper
I don't have a problem with this. They're lucky that Canonical is giving them
anything. As with anything else in free software, an individual is free to get
in there and change the Amazon affiliate code and redistribute the modified
software, and there's no obligation to give any part of that revenue to any
other party, including the original author of the software.

Canonical would be losing a significant stream of revenue by switching to
Banshee as the default music player in Ubuntu without doing something to
recuperate the revenue they've heretofore derived from their stores in
Rhythmbox. Banshee is going to end up making more out of this anyway as
Ubuntu's new default player, and if you don't like the cash going to
Canonical, you can download a build elsewhere or patch the source yourself so
that the original affiliate code is restored.

People have to have money to function, even in free software.

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joe_the_user
I agree Canonical's behavior doesn't seem out-of-line.

The difference between this and Apple's App store policy is that anyone create
an alternative and anyone can load an alternative once they get distribution.

The comment section certainly gave me pause - it seems someone has a lot of
bad feelings towards Ubuntu.

As I understand, Red Hat is larger, profitable business that has paid for a
lot Gnome development (Wikipedia say Red Hat: 87.25 million net income, 3,200
employees, Canonical: $30 million net income, 350+ employees, pretty exactly
one _tenth_ the side of Red Hat).

Great but somehow the integration effort put into Canonical's distribution
creates a considerably more usable system that has a good deal more traction.
If, hypothetically, Canonical is "leaching", then it should really, really
easy to put together a superior distribution to Ubuntu. Somehow no one has
done that.

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darklajid
The packaging for most mono based packages are community driven. I bet that
they didn't pay a dime to get a readily packaged software. There's no
integration effort (except for maybe their 'branding' efforts, see their tries
to differentiate in some places of the desktop, e.g. the notification area).
None at all.

Comparing Apple (asking for a share of the profit! people make on their
platform) with a company picking a product that donates to a non-profit
foundation and changing the rules (for that product, btw. We're talking about
a single decision, for a single product. No 'It's always been part of the
terms of use' discussion, no 'It's the same for everyone' treatment) is kinda
sad.

There's no AppStore(tm) here. Apple's not even remotely connected to this
change.

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motters
Canonical should leave the Amazon store alone, and give users the freedom to
decide whether to buy their music using UbuntuOne (donating to Canonical) or
Amazon (Donating to Gnome). Even better, under System/Preferences make the
donation preferences configurable (I'd like to see a donation control panel
allowing you to allocate a donation to different FOSS projects based upon your
usage of them, or according to some user defined ratios).

~~~
tedreed
I already have an Amazon account. Why would I go out of my way to get a
different account just so a few pennies of my purchase can go somewhere
different?

I don't think the "leave it to the users" option really works here. A lot of
people will choose the least-work path.

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rmc
Canonical don't get 75% of the sale, they get 75% of the affiliate bonus. I
don't know how much it is, but I guess its low (anyone know?)

~~~
dmaz
Looks like 10%[1], so Canonical gets 7.5% of the sale. For comparison Apple
takes $0.29 per $0.99 song.

[1] [https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/comp...](https://affiliate-
program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join/compensation.html)

~~~
whatusername
Apple processes the Credit Card and provides the distribution.

So not quite a fair comparison.

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ssp
Banshee might want to consider getting a trademark on their name, and then
only allow other people to use it if they keep the affiliate code that goes to
the GNOME Foundation.

~~~
natrius
It would probably be a net negative for the Banshee project. Ubuntu wants
Banshee to be the default player because of the quality of the software, not
the name. I don't think they'd mind being forced to rename it UbuntuTunes.

