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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 20:19 UTC (Wed) by zonker (subscriber, #7867)In reply to: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) by Lovechild Parent article: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)
I don't recall being "offended on your behalf," I'm offended on my own behalf - thanks.
When I was still with Novell, I was asked about whether we should earmark the monies for GNOME and I was in full support of that rather than having an "every project/company for itself" type of attitude and trying to grab the profits for Novell.
Banshee is the app du jour on this issue, but it's not the first nor last. It's a crappy policy, in my opinion, for a provider like Canonical to insert itself into a affiliate program - and take the lion share of the cut - for an application that has largely been developed on other people's dime or other people's time. Doubly so when the monies are earmarked for a non-profit that provides much of the software that forms the foundation of Canonical's business.
If you feel OK with it, then that's your call - but I really don't think it's reasonable. Further - it at the least deserves attention so that Canonical's user base and contributor community is aware of the situation. Other developers who might be thinking about doing something similar may think twice before bothering if downstream projects like Ubuntu are simply going to override the default.
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Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 20:32 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Assuming Canonical's approach to revenue sharing with Banshee is typical of how they approach ISV's with regard to revenue sharing generally..this is not a good sign for their pay-to-place partner repository effort associated with their software center to turn Ubuntu into a platform. Any ISV that wants to sustain their own development of their application with micropayments or subscription revenue from Ubuntu users is going to be hardpressed to find terms such as 75% revenue to Canonical a workable revenue-sharing relationship. That's a really big problem. I don't see how Canonical's Software Center will turn into a vibrant AppStore-like marketplace with such heavy taxation in place for ISVs. It's crippling business model.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 21:07 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
http://gburt.blogspot.com/2011/02/banshee-supporting-gnom...
Shuttleworth speakth:
So this is self-consistent behaviour from Canonical and not a Banshee specific engagement. I just don't see how Canonical is going to sustain a robust ISV marketplace with a 75% revenue taxation rate.
-jef
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 21:17 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (subscriber, #41828) [Link]
And people think Apple's "we'll take our 30% on everything you do for allowing you to be on our platform" position is offensive.
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 23:17 UTC (Wed) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]
> And people think Apple's "we'll take our 30% on everything you do for allowing you to be on our platform" position is offensive.
They're hardly comparable figures. The 30% is the proportion of the song price that Apple takes. The 75% is a proportion of the affiliate kickback, which will be some fraction of what Amazon takes of the song price. Assuming Amazon takes the same proportion of the song price as Apple does, and that they kick a third of it back to the affiliate (both fairly generous assumptions), the total affiliate kickback would be about 10% of song price, and Canonical's take 7.5% of song price.
(Note: Obviously, this does not affect the substance of the debate on what a fair Canonical/Gnome split would be in the least; all I'm criticising is the 75% to Apple's 30% comparison.)
Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World) Posted Feb 16, 2011 23:43 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Apple's new 30% policy is not about music...its being applied for all apps that have a subscription or content based delivery model.
http://www.technewsdaily.com/apple-wants-30-of-subscripti...
Including ebooks purchased from vendors like Amazon:
And furthermore it appears that Google is looking for a 10% revenue cut for app developers who want to sign up subscribers via its Google One Pass offering to app developers.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209861/Rhapsody_b...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/02/...
The question isn't whether a platform entity like Apple or Google or Canonical should get revenue from app developers. They should. The question is what sort of cut is reasonable and fair. If 10% is being accepted as fair and 30% is being pointed to as unsustainable..then logic holds that a 75% stake of any revenue stream is pure crazy and full of fail.
If Canonical is intent on making a 75% revenue split their standing policy when working with any ISV and any retailer...they are going to fail at generating interest in their platform from such vendors.
-jef
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