Application Development is not the whole story.

Posted Feb 17, 2011 12:10 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Application Development is not the whole story. by grantingram
Parent article: Banshee Amazon Store disabled in Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical (Network World)

"I'm not sure therefore why application development is more important (and more worthy of a revenue stream) than polishing the user experience."

Application development is what led to affiliate revenues.

If you are Novell and you developed Banshee and decided explicitly that the revenue from affiliate deals should go to GNOME Foundation, a non-profit entity instead of a commercial vendor, would you regret that decision now? Something to consider.

to post comments

Application Development is not the whole story.

Posted Feb 17, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you are Novell and you developed Banshee and decided explicitly that the revenue from affiliate deals should go to GNOME Foundation, a non-profit entity instead of a commercial vendor, would you regret that decision now?

Why should you? That people using and/or redistributing the free software you wrote, decide differently shouldn't bother you at all. By doing that those people stay well within the boundaries set by, well, the core principles of free software. You should not develop free software if you are uncomfortable with that.

(Please note that, as far as I know, the Banshee developers actually do seem to be comfortable with the decisions discussed here).

Application Development is not the whole story.

Posted Feb 17, 2011 22:09 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

"Why should you? That people using and/or redistributing the free software you wrote, decide differently shouldn't bother you at all."

It's cool if you feel that way, but not so cool that you suggest how others "should" feel about something. Obviously, a number of people feel that it's not right for other players to override the affiliate codes for their own gain.

Just because licenses allow a certain type of behavior, it doesn't mean that the community or developers condone it or have to shrug and accept it.

"(Please note that, as far as I know, the Banshee developers actually do seem to be comfortable with the decisions discussed here)."

I've had two Banshee developers indicate that they were in favor of the story, so... there may be a lot of daylight between being "OK" with the decision enough not to raise a complaint and actually being "comfortable" with it.

Application Development is not the whole story.

Posted Feb 17, 2011 23:53 UTC (Thu) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link]

"Application development is what led to affiliate revenues"

Well yes but there wouldn't be an affiliate revenues if the application didn't have a distribution to umm distribute it. This is the old chicken and egg argument :-)

I think if you explicitly decided anything about affiliate revenues from your software you haven't read the license you are releasing it under.

Whether Novell regrets taking a particular course of action rather depends on why they did it - which I have absolutely zero information about.