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Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)Posted Feb 16, 2011 17:13 UTC (Wed) by cdamian (subscriber, #1271)Parent article: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)
"Amazon MP3 support in Banshee competes with Ubuntu's own offering, Ubuntu One" - This could be a quote straight from an Apple iOS application rejection letter.
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Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 17:28 UTC (Wed) by Thue (subscriber, #14277) [Link]
Except that unlike Apple
1) The user is free to install the Amazon store on their own 2) Anybody can make a Ubuntu derivative which includes the Amazon store
The money for free software has to come from somewhere. If this is the solution, then I can personally live with it.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 17:33 UTC (Wed) by cdamian (subscriber, #1271) [Link]
I obviously didn't mean it that serious. But it is one reason why I like Fedora, who just make their money in a different way.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:01 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Fedora doesn't make money.
Red Hat makes money.
Red Hat spends some of the money it makes providing the infrastructure that Fedora uses.
Red Hat _deliberately_ separated Fedora as a brand to differentiate it to better separate community efforts from monetization efforts to _reduce_ the surface over which conflicts of interest between business interests and community interests overlap and get mixed up. They are not completely separated, because community interests will always be wider than available resources which Red Hat can prudently provide Fedora and still remain a solvent business.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 17:43 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
The difference is Apple has very deliberately created a closed garden for themselves and their consumers. I'm not happy with Apple's model, but at the same time I can't point to them and say they are hypocritical or self-destructive in their protectionism. They've done the work in-house to create the framework, the applications and the service...all the pieces necessary to have an integrated retail music experience. If they feel they need to protect that by excluding other services..that is highly self-consistent...even if its anti-competitive aspects of that policy end up causing them to defend themselves in a court of law at some point.
Canonical on the other hand...hasn't done the work necessary to build a closed platform like Apple has with iOS. Canonical's model relies heavily on the work being done by others in important pieces of their platform stack...in this particular case the upstream Banshee and GNOME developers. So when Canonical wants an inequitable high percentage of the revenue flowing through the banshee application...its both hypocritical and self-destructive. Heavily taxing growing revenue streams for upstream projects your platform is meant to rely on (because you don't have the engineering resources to build your own best of breed integrated applications) is eating your own seed corn for the sake of short term gain.
And let me stress the inequitablely high percentage of revenue part of that comment. The offer on the table was for Canonical to _take_ 75% of the revenue from the Amazon storefront they didn't build in an application they don't help develop. There is no mention if Canonical was also offering to _give_ 25% of the UIMS store revenue to banshee developers for producing an application that Canonical could use instead of Canonical expensing the manpower to build their own app.
If Canonical wants to mimic the closed garden revenue stream control that Apple has over iOS,then Canonical needs to go back to square one and build a closed garden that they can control instead of trying to pound an open ecosystem model into a closed garden model...it's a round peg/square hole situation.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 17:58 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Canonical on the other hand...hasn't done the work necessary to build a closed platform like Apple has with iOS. Canonical's model relies heavily on the work being done by others in important pieces of their platform stack...in this particular case the upstream Banshee and GNOME developers. So when Canonical wants an inequitable high percentage of the revenue flowing through the banshee application...its both hypocritical and self-destructive. Heavily taxing growing revenue streams for upstream projects your platform is meant to rely on (because you don't have the engineering resources to build your own best of breed integrated applications) is eating your own seed corn for the sake of short term gain.
I think that Canonical and Banshee can both benefit from this arrangement. Canonical will benefit from the potential profits and Banshee can benefit from the massive increase in exposure and support that Canonical can provide them by making them the default player on the premier Linux desktop OS.
If you think it is unlikely that Banshee's Amazon MP3 support support will get discovered if it's disabled by default... imagine how difficult it will be to find when the entire Banshee application is not installed by default.
One of the benefits to using software like Banshee is that it's plug able. Otherwise why use anything other then just Totem or whatever for playing music? From the comment below it indicates that Ubuntu and Banshee folks are quite amicable with this compromise. Ubuntu gave them reasonable terms and the plugin is still there. The ball is now in Gnome and Banshee's court to promote the plugins and other stores that Banshee can support. If they do a good job they should be able to get more money then if Ubuntu left the plugin enabled and did nothing to promote it's usage.
While the potential revenue stream and profitability of something like this is far from assured it's a promising development that people are seeking ways to make decent profits from software without really attempting to restrict user's access to it.
> If Canonical wants to mimic the closed garden revenue stream control that Apple has over iOS,then Canonical needs to go back to square one and build a closed garden that they can control instead of trying to pound an open ecosystem model into a closed garden model...it's a round peg/square hole situation.
Yeah... no. I'd rather they not do that actually. That is much worse then what they are doing now.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:08 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] Ubuntu gave them reasonable terms"Give us three quarters of the money you make, or we turn your revenue stream off entirely" would not be many people's idea of 'reasonable'.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:22 UTC (Wed) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]
Well we do give 100% of the revenue away as it is and in both the suggested options the benefactors are entities that supports us and our ecosystem.
I don't really see the problem and surely with being the default in a distribution such as Ubuntu the GNOME Foundation would still see a healthy income even at 25% from the Amazon integration.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 19:03 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'm not saying Canonical should follow Apples model. I'm saying that the current sort of in-between-ness of the business path Canonical is following fits what they are doing now about as well as my high school prom tux fits me now.
I think the follow-up comment from jzb on his own article sums the inequity in the proposal nicely:
"A fifty-fifty split may be fair, but I don't see how Canonical is entitled to the majority share here. Hell, even Apple "only" asks for 30% of subscription fees, etc., on its platform."
Platform gatekeepers can be overly aggressive in the revenue sharing mandates. The mark of a well executable platform taxation strategy is to reign in the impulse to punitively tax external developers. A 75% revenue grab is simply untenable. And if Canonical wants this sort of revenue cut from potential end-user focused ISV's they won't be seeing a huge uptake in their re-invented partner repository centered on the software store. This sort of steep revenue sharing will most assuredly kill sustained interest from people like game developers who might be interested in reaching Ubuntu users via for-pay placement in the software center.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 19:09 UTC (Wed) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] So in other words Canonical is saying to the Banshee folks: pay us to be in Ubuntu.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 19:36 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
It would be more correct to say, "pay us to select your application as the default application in Ubuntu even though we've already selected your application to be the default because we think you guys did an excellent job building the application and we don't want to spend the money or the time building or our application"
And its important to note that Canonical has in the past changed the affiliate ID for the rhythmbox magnatunes store in the past..and garnered a small amount of revenue that would have otherwise gone to GNOME from Magnatunes.
So in one sense this is progress. Canonical didn't just hijack the Banshee revenue stream entirely. They learned _something_ from the experiment with Magnatunes. (Interesting to note that even with magnatunes enabled by default in Ubuntu..prior to the U1MS being available...Ubuntu users only accounted for 1/6th of the rhythmbox based magnatune revenue...fascinating don't you think if you ascribe to the idea that Ubuntu was the most popular rhythmbox distributor at the time).
Canonical actually reverted rhythmbox back to the default at some point and left the plugin enabled by default as well.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:18 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> And let me stress the inequitablely high percentage of revenue part of that comment. The offer on the table was for Canonical to _take_ 75% of the revenue from the Amazon storefront they didn't build in an application they don't help develop
I know that we all value software development much more highly than other activities around here, but let me play devil's advocate for a bit. What percentage of Canonical's users would be using banshee if not for Canonical's efforts with Ubuntu? It's clear that some proportion of Ubuntu's user base -- perhaps a large portion, and perhaps especially those who expect to buy music through their music player -- wouldn't have Linux on their desktop if it weren't for Canonical's efforts.
I have plenty of doubts about Canonical's business model, decisions, and whether they really "deserve" their spot as *the* newbie distribution, but some portion of that revenue -- perhaps a very large portion -- really is due to their efforts, one way or another. Just not in developing the app.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:30 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
For a company which has self-described itself as doing the last 10% of the work..to request that 75% of a revenue stream be given to them seems a bit out of place. 10% sure, 25% maybe, 50% if revenue sharing of _all_ retail revenue include U1MS as well as Amazon were on offer. But 75%..as a starting position for a revenue sharing negotiation... that's cutthroat.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 23:14 UTC (Wed) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
If you say so. I don't really have an intuition.
But I guess they got negotiated down from an unreasonable 75% to a more reasonable 100% (i.e., directing people to U1MS instead). So compromise worked? ;-)
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 18:26 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] The offer on the table was for Canonical to _take_ 75% of the revenue from the Amazon storefront they didn't build in an application they don't help develop.They don't develop neither build that application - they distribute it. That Banshee application wouldn't generate any revenue if it would just languish in source code form on some server. Of course, I have no idea how big is the Ubuntu users' share in all Banshee installations (probably nobody has exact figures), so maybe that 75% is not that much or way too much. The average gain in some retail business could be around 50%, so 75% seems to be a little too much, but they probably know what they are doing...
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 19:24 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] They don't develop neither build that application - they distribute it. That Banshee application wouldn't generate any revenue if it would just languish in source code form on some server. But this argument starts to resemble something like, "Aren't you happy that your software is popular, developers?!" And then the attitude is that people's primary goal in writing Free Software is for that software to become as popular as possible, regardless of the compromises made in order to achieve that goal. Next up: "We don't like the licence you've used since we can't make a proprietary version of your application which we think would be very popular. Don't you want to be popular?"
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:13 UTC (Wed) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]
We collect anonymous statistics and Ubuntu account for the majority of users who opt in. The stats aren't publicly available yet for reasons unknown to me (likely lack of manpower).
The last figures I have put Ubuntu at 73% of all users. Admittedly these are from right after we enabled the feature in the 1.5.4 release and Ubuntu is simply an easier platform for users to experience development releases of Banshee which could bias the number. However since I read every incoming bug report and the same data regarding the underlying system is present in the logs this number does not seem far off.
The vast majority of our users are on Ubuntu using any way of counting them I have available.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:19 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
To be clear.. these stats are from user who purchase from the Amazon store, or is it users of banshee generally?
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:54 UTC (Wed) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]
users, we do not collect any data on the Amazon. However every bugreport I recall off hand on the Amazon support has been from an Ubuntu user.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 21:02 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'll point you to the history of the magnatune revenue in rhythmbox. It can be argued that most rhythmbox users were Ubuntu users in 2008 and yet they only accounted for 1/6 of the purchasing revenue generated from rhythmbox from Magnatunes. A majority of users of the application..but a small fraction of consumers willing to pay for content.
The point being. Usage habits and purchasing habits cannot be assumed to correlated, the magnatune revenue data shows the danger in that. Popularity does not directly equate to purchasing power and it can not be assumed that Ubuntu users of banshee will generated revenue in proportion to their numbers.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 19:47 UTC (Wed) by nlee (guest, #730) [Link]
"The offer on the table was for Canonical to _take_ 75% of the revenue from the Amazon storefront they didn't build in an application they don't help develop."
How about the flip sides? Ubuntu produce a popular platform for people's desktops, this costs them money. Why should Banshee be able to use this platform to generate cash without any contribution back to the provider?
One thing I do not understand is why Banshee turned down 25% of the income from 100% of Banshee users on Ubuntu vs 100% of the income of maybe 5-10% of Banshee users on Ubuntu who know how to turn the Amazon store.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 17, 2011 5:25 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
Are you suggesting that it's reasonable for platforms to charge developers for the right to be installable?
The platform wouldn't exist without the software. On the other hand Banshee exists on a number of platforms other than Ubuntu
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 17, 2011 20:24 UTC (Thu) by nlee (guest, #730) [Link]
"Are you suggesting that it's reasonable for platforms to charge developers for the right to be installable?"
I'm suggesting that if an application generates "subscription" (*) revenue, why shouldn't the platform providing the chance for the application to generate this income request a share.
As to whether 75/25 is fair is another question - always a chance for Banshee to negotiate.
(*) Including ads or referal income
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 17, 2011 21:43 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
The ability for Banshee to negotiate the X/Y split is an assumption. No one has so far stated that Canonical was willing to negotiate on the terms of the split or that Banshee developers failed to inquire if Canonical was interested in negotiating. The only statement on record that we have is from the Banshee camp that Canonical presented them with 2 options and they chose the option they were most comfortable with.
The statement's so far on record are not written in such a way as to give insight as to whether Canonical was receptive to any efforts to negotiate something other than those 2 options or if any such efforts from Banshee devs were floated. If you can point me to something written from either a Banshee dev or from a Canonical exec that suggests otherwise...please providing me with a reference for me to read over.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 17, 2011 16:52 UTC (Thu) by JEDIDIAH (guest, #14504) [Link]
> Ubuntu produce a popular platform for people's desktops
No they don't.
They PACKAGE a popular platform for people's desktop.
Someone else produces it.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 17, 2011 20:28 UTC (Thu) by nlee (guest, #730) [Link]
"Someone else produces it."
How is your statement different from what Debian does? Or slackware? Or even LFS?
You can't argue that Ubuntu provides no value.
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