Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 9, 2011 18:59 UTC (Fri) by Lovechild (guest, #3592)
In reply to: Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code by theophrastus
Parent article: Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

1) Go to the Amazon store within Banshee
2) Buy songs
3) Profit

there is a referral token added to the transaction and the owner of that token gets a small cut for sending business Amazon's way. Many little cuts do however make a fairly sizable stream, I believe in the past year Banshee's support for Amazon made the GNOME Foundation over 9000 USD.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 9, 2011 19:05 UTC (Fri) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link] (7 responses)

So it is just an altered URL? So what stops me from hex-editing in Banshee a referral to my own account? (yes i know that would be pennies since i'm just one pathetic user) Does one have to register with Amazon? and if so, why does anyone trust Amazon to deal a fair cut?

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 9, 2011 19:19 UTC (Fri) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]

Nothing prevents you from altering the code and running your own redirect service (I believe Banshee even includes the code to do this). It is all under the MIT X11 license, more freedom than you can throw a moose at.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 9, 2011 19:19 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (3 responses)

Why are you hex-editing? This is an open source program you can just rebuild, if you want. The comment in the source code asks you nicely not to, though. http://git.gnome.org/browse/banshee/tree/src/Extensions/B...

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 10:58 UTC (Sat) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (2 responses)

Changing a fixed length string in a binary is much easier than instlalling the build tool chain and compiling the whole thing from source.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 12, 2011 3:15 UTC (Mon) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link] (1 responses)

With Debian based systems, it's really easy to rebuild things from source: apt-get source foo to get the source, sudo apt-get build-dep foo to get the build dependencies, and then something like debuild -i -us -uc -b to build the package. Hex editing may be a lot quicker for a big package, but it really isn't much easier.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 13, 2011 15:51 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You may find apt-src to be a useful tool, too.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 13:12 UTC (Sat) by andreasb (guest, #80258) [Link] (1 responses)

What exactly would be the point of changing the referral for yourself? So you get a tiny sum of money once for referring one person (yourself) to Amazon?

Unless you can get lots of people to use the Banshee with your referral account, a single referral of yourself to Amazon (if referring yourself is even allowed) won't exactly be a fountain of riches.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 19:12 UTC (Sat) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]

yes i knew that. it was a hypothetical to clarify my understanding of the underlying mechanism. for instance, i wanted to be clear that there wasn't a "tee" in this process that sent any of my (financial) information directly to Ubuntu or Linux_Mint or whom-ever (the experts here have obviously checked that that isn't the case and have thereby allayed my fears [wink])

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 5:36 UTC (Sat) by joey (guest, #328) [Link] (2 responses)

So Gnome makes $750 / month, Mint makes $3.41 / month ... sounds like we have a new metric to measure the number of users of Mint as opposed to overall users of Gnome.

<gdr>

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 12:38 UTC (Sat) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Or it just means Mint users prefer other media players. Such high profits for Gnome are made mainly by Ubuntu users, but this will change with 12.04.

Linux Mint switches Banshee's Amazon MP3 store referral code

Posted Dec 10, 2011 14:11 UTC (Sat) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link]

If they've only made the change recently, wouldn't that $3.41 only represent those having the bleeding edge Mint? Or was this an update that also went to older Mint installations?