[ale] Canonical makes Apple look so good...

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 19:48 -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On 3/7/2011 7:29 PM, Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> > They're not.  They sell services and support, and they have other
> ways
> > of making money.  The GNOME Foundation thrives on donations.
> >
> > I cannot begin to quantify precisely how I feel about this, other
> than
> > to say that it is very doubtful in my own mind that I will continue
> to
> > use Ubuntu.  And I might even start to advocate against it.
> 
> so, help me understand this completely. I really liked banshee, should
> I not use it, or is it just people that BUY stuff through it, which I
> do not. I currently have debian installed on my laptop, though I WAS
> thinking of installing kubuntu 10.10. Now I will NOT. Running Debian,
> is not a bad thing, right? nore is running Banshee.. 

The modification that Ubuntu is making only affects those who purchase
media from Amazon through Banshee.

Banshee has an affiliate code, which they submit to Amazon when anyone
orders music through Banshee's UI.  This means that anytime someone
purchases music from Amazon through Banshee, Amazon gives the Banshee
developers a kickback on that purchase.  Banshee's developers then turn
around and donate those funds to the GNOME Foundation.

What Canonical is doing is circumventing that; they've gone out and
acquired their *own* affiliate code.  The version of Banshee that will
appear in Ubuntu 11.04 will use Canonical's affiliate code, and not the
Banshee project's affiliate code.  Canonical will only give 25% of the
affiliate fees to the GNOME Foundation, keeping the other 75% of them
for itself.

IMHO, that is a really awful thing to do---for more than one reason.
Firstly, Canonical has sources of revenue from the sales of support and
other services.  The GNOME Foundation's only source of revenue, AFAIK,
is donations.  What the Banshee project has done is to provide a means
to increase the donations to the GNOME Foundation and thus ensure that
GNOME's development will continue to be funded.

Also note that this is much more complex than just money.  Canonical
seems to feel that they are somehow more important than the GNOME
project and thus more worthy to receive donations.  They are pulling a
nasty trick out of their hat: many people have heard about Banshee's
efforts to ensure that the GNOME Foundation will get money from
purchases through Amazon.  It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to
learn that there are at least some people who aren't aware of what
Canonical is going to be doing with the replacement of the affiliate
code and purchase music thinking that 100% of the affiliate fee is going
to go to the GNOME Foundation.

Furthermore, on more than one occasion, Canonical and its employees have
made accusations that the GNOME project has some sort of anti-Canonical
bias, and there are at least one or two people out there on the Internet
scraping together anything they can which could be construed in such a
light.  Canonical claims that the GNOME project is a bunch of
mean-spirited individuals because they allegedly rejected a proposal
from Canonical to use Canonical's Unity as the front-end for GNOME 3.
Plainly speaking, they just didn't want Unity, as best as I can tell.
And honestly, I can't say I blame them: I don't really like Unity.  Not
that my opinion really matters (and neither does the GNOME project's;
Unity will be the default UI in the GTK based Ubuntu 11.04 release,
period, because that's what makes Shuttleworth's dick hard).  He's not
about community.  He's about him---and he's made that crystal clear with
this whole mess.  It's been pretty apparent for a long time, but never
over something significant like this.

What Canonical is doing is ethically wrong and is the level of crap I'd
expect to see from a politician, not someone who claims to care about
the free software ecosystem(s).

	--- Mike