[ Thanks to Joe
Brockmeier for this link. ]
“Faced with sharing 75% of revenues from Amazon with
Canonical, the Banshee maintainers have opted to disable the Amazon
store by default when Banshee ships in Ubuntu 11.04. Instead, the
media player will ship with support for purchasing music through
Ubuntu One’s service, and users will have to change the defaults to
be able to support GNOME.“In a nutshell — Banshee is a media/music player for Linux
that has support for purchasing music via Amazon MP3. The revenues
have always gone directly to the GNOME Foundation. Historically,
the default music player in Ubuntu has been Rhythmbox, but that’s
changing in 11.04 to Banshee. The problem, at least as Canonical
seems to see it? Amazon MP3 support in Banshee competes with
Ubuntu’s own offering, Ubuntu One — which also has support
for purchasing music. The alternative? Canonical offered to leave
the Amazon Store on by default, but take a 75% cut by changing the
affiliate code and then passing a paltry 25% on to GNOME. The good
news is that Canonical conferred with the Banshee team and gave
them the option, so they elected to disable the store by default.
Users can re-enable it if they are aware of the Amazon store, but
defaults are powerful: Many users may never even realize that the
Amazon store is an option.”