Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 17, 2011 22:58 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
In reply to: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software by jake
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

There is no evidence that Canonical was willing to take a financial hit in the original offer put forward to Banshee. Even in the final arrangement that Canonical unilaterally imposed on the Banshee developers its still not clear that Canonical takes a financial hit. Canonical is taking a cut of the Banshee revenue stream and making money. Whether or not their cut is unreasonable is immaterial to the point at hand.

Clearly Banshee developers felt empowered before Canonical as a distributor decided they deserved a cut for providing a platform. Nothing Canonical did "empowered" Banshee devs to build that revenue stream.

And since we are talking numbers... does Canonical have a public fee schedule for application developers who want to build revenue streams that Canonical will be taking a reasonable cut of in the future as platform provider?

We've seen Google just announce at GoogleIO a flat 5% commission on revenue generating apps which make use of their html5 based platform on ChromeOS (AngryBirds being the showpiece for that). And we've also seen some information concerning Apple "empowerment" of application developer revenue models (poor poor CoverFlow) But I really haven't seen anything concrete from Canonical about what application developers can expect. Or does Canonical anticipate that so few developers are going to be interested in their platform that they can just handle revenue sharing on a case by case basis.

-jef

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 25, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed) by loftsy (guest, #75160) [Link] (6 responses)

If the Banshee project had a copyright assignment policy then they would be in a stronger position to negotiate revenue share with the distributions. So your example actually illustrates Mark's point precisely.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 8:02 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't see how such an agreement would help the Banshee developers; they choose to release their code under GPL terms, and Canonical/Ubuntu are complying with those terms. If one entity held all the copyrights on Banshee, I still don't see how they could use that leverage to affect Canonical's behaviour.

Copyright-wise, what Canonical is doing is legal. Its the morality of their actions that's in dispute; legal ownership of the copyright is a non-sequitur.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 16:39 UTC (Thu) by loftsy (guest, #75160) [Link] (3 responses)

I'll give you a specific example to illustrate how having more control over your code gives you more flexibility over distribution. Please note I'm using an example to show a more general point - I haven't actually thought long and hard about potential Banshee business models of which I'm sure there are many.

Banshee could have written the Amazon plugin under a more restrictive license which prevented Ubuntu from changing the billing code. Then used their control of the Banshee source-code to allow the usage of the proprietary plugin.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 16:59 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Banshee's under MIT/X11. If they'd wanted to do that, they could have done.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by loftsy (guest, #75160) [Link]

Heh - OK I guess you've got me there. If you license basically says "Do whatever you want with it" then you don't make much downstream control!

Still - it doesn't change the fact that retaining copyright provides you with options. In this case it would have to come down to relicensing.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Effectively, what you're saying is that if the Banshee developers had chosen to take their code proprietary, they wouldn't have trouble with Canonical taking advantage of the benefits of Free Software.

While that's certainly true, that's not a benefit to Free Software, and if that's the sort of thing that people are coming up with that justifies copyright assignment, then I'm going to remain sceptical of Mark's motivations.

Mark Shuttleworth on companies and free software

Posted May 26, 2011 8:04 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

> If the Banshee project had a copyright assignment policy then they would be in a stronger position to negotiate revenue share with the distributions.

Only if they're willing to threaten to go from a free license to a proprietary license only otherwise their position wouldn't be much stronger.

If a project do this, it wouldn't be considered anymore as a free software project I think..