Ubuntu One Music Store -- what will openSUSE be doing?

Hello,

I'm Jeff Mitchell, one of the Amarok authors. Nice to meet all of you.

As you may know, Amarok has supported multiple music stores for some
time. We have had one explicit music store -- Magnatune -- and the
framework for more. We've been in talks with some other independent
stores and so far no other store plugins have been created, but
generally only for lack of investment by these stores (many of them tend
to go out of business before they really get off the ground...such is
the industry). Amarok gets a small cut of sales to Magnatune, which are
reinvested in the project -- which is a non-profit entity incorporated
under the SFC.

I posed a question to Will Stephenson during Camp KDE, and I'd like to
bring it up here today, in light of the Ubuntu One Music Store plugin
finally being pushed in Rhythmbox (see
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nz... ). The concept
had been public before, but not much information has been available.

Currently, the implementation is a plugin to Rhythmbox. It's unknown if
they're going to try to push it into Rhythmbox trunk. Certainly there is
a precedent for them to try: after all, we have the Magnatune music
store, which as far as I know is included on all distributions of Amarok.

There is of course a very large difference between the two -- the cut of
track sales that Magnatune gives to Amarok goes to a non-profit entity
and is used to fund developer sprints, pay our hosting costs and the
like. As a result of this, no distribution seems to have a problem
shipping the Magnatune code. Canonical however is a for-profit company.
Other distributions shipping this plugin means that you're helping
Canonical make their money for them, and I haven't heard of any method
of Canonical sharing profit with other distributions.

Why is this a problem? It isn't, necessarily -- but I do worry about the
implications of for-profit distributions or projects or companies
getting in a habit of pushing code upstream -- or on other distributions
-- with the sole purpose of earning money (as opposed to earning money
by improving FOSS and creating a more salable product). It seems like a
fairly slippery slope. I'm not sure that Canonical will try to get this
in Rhythmbox trunk, but I'm interested in knowing how openSUSE would
respond in this case, if openSUSE might voluntarily ship this plugin,
and the thoughts of the openSUSE community in general.

Thanks,
Jeff