Shuttleworth on the Ubuntu Banshee controversy: Mistakes were made

[ Thanks to Steven J.
Vaughan-Nichols for this link. ]

“The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what
should be done with Banshee’s Amazon Store revenue stream, while it
was finally resolved, was not Ubuntu’s most shining moment. At the
matter’s conclusion, Banshee developers were not happy with the
results. This is not how open-source communities should work
together and no one knows that better than Mark Shuttleworth,
Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, who wrote, “We made some
mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share
with the Banshee team.”

“In his blog, which Shuttleworth often uses to discuss matters
of importance to Ubuntu, open-source, and Linux in general, he
started, “Money is particularly contentious in a community that
mixes volunteer and paid effort, we should have anticipated and
been extra careful to have the difficult conversations that were
inevitable up front and in public, at UDS [Ubuntu Developer
Summit], when we were talking about the possibility of Banshee
being the default media player in Ubuntu. We didn’t, and I
apologize for the consequential confusion and upset caused.””

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