Banshee, Canonical and how to earn an honest living in open source

[ Thanks to Linux User &
Developer magazine for this link. ]

“openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, discusses
Canonical’s heavy handed tactics over Banshee referrals, and
wonders how an openSUSE Foundation might make an honest living in
open source…

“Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier wrote an interesting article on Open
Source Report about the Banshee Amazon store in Ubuntu 11.04. To
quickly summarize the situation, Banshee will be the new default
music player in Ubuntu. Let me say up front, as a disclaimer:
Banshee is to a large extent being developed by my employer,
Novell. Banshee has support for the Amazon music store and includes
a referral code in there, as you’d expect. The benefits of this
amount to around $10,000 per year right now, which goes to the
GNOME Foundation. Sadly, Canonical recently visited the Banshee
mailing list and told them the Amazon store had to go. It could
stay, they said, but only if Banshee gave 75% of the earnings to
Canonical instead of GNOME. The Banshee developers graciously
declined. Now Banshee (in Ubuntu at least) will have Ubuntu One as
default music store and users will have to enable Amazon by
themselves.

“Like Joe, I have no problem with Canonical trying to make money
on Ubuntu One. I do have an issue with them taking it away from the
projects who develop the code they ship to their customers, though.
It might have been more reasonable if Canonical would have been
looking for an even split – even Apple doesn’t take more than
a 30% cut”

Complete Story