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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 17:58 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333)In reply to: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) by jspaleta Parent article: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)
> 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.
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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
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