August record month for the GNOME Foundation

By , Published September 3, 2010

For the month of August the Amazon affiliate program gained the GNOME foundation ~$500, more than twice as much as the month before (at $231). The biggest reason for this sudden increase is the Amazon MP3 integration which is shipping in the current development version of Banshee which alone accounted for $175 being brought in for the Foundation.

It should be noted that till the 1.7.5 release released on September 1st Banshee has not shipped affiliate codes for anything but the US store and is still a development release so the coming months numbers will surely be interesting to follow as they are only likely to increase.

Do you think the GNOME foundation will ever be able to be fully funded in this way?

Thank you to Jaap A. Haitsma for his monthly Amazon affiliate summary

Related posts:

  1. Banshee 1.7.4 released, adds user manual,
  2. Support GNOME by buying music in Banshee
  3. Support GNOME by shopping at Amazon
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  • Dragonbite

    Maybe not completely, but something like this will help a lot!

  • http://twitter.com/jspaleta Jef Spaleta

    Can GNOME be fully funded in this way? Not if downstream distributors like Canonical change the referral codes and redirect money to their own coffers instead of letting the money flow back all the way to GNOME.

    Canonical in the past changed the referral code for the magnatunes store in rhythmbox so that money that would have otherwise been sent to GNOME Foundation if the referral information in the Ubuntu binaries of rhythmbox had not been changed. Will Canonical do it again with Amazon referral revenue in Banshee? Do you think its fair for downstream distributors to change the referral information and redirect funds that would otherwise support the upstream GNOME foundation?

    -jef

    • http://twitter.com/Sephiroth_VII Sephiroth_VII
    • Andreas Nilsson

      As far as I know, it got fixed and refers to GNOME again now.

    • https://launchpad.net/~davidnielsen David Nielsen

      Banshee requests that nobody change the affiliate code, but if a downstream feels it can better distribute the income than the GNOME Foundation then I feel it is valid for them to take measures to prove this.

      Canonical is already benefiting Banshee and I see no harm in them redirecting the funds. E.g. Canonical unlike pretty much every other vendor, GNOME included, have consistently treated .NET developers as first class citizens. You don’t see them rolling out anything new without support for Mono nor without code examples in C#. Aside that we gain a lot of testers and contributors from their efforts, as well as patches. I think the relationship established between the two parties is healthy.

      Though the bottom line is that they are in their good right to do so, so is anyone else. It is part of the freedom that comes with open source and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

    • Anonymous

      Canonical should change it to their’s, unless they like having their ideas shot down by Gnome.

  • vamega

    Perhaps it could account for a significant contribution, if the default browser shipped had Amazon gnome store as the default as well.

    However is distributions keep changing the referral codes, then GNOME will have to find alternative sources.

    This is one of the challenges of just being a platform, and not a distribution that GNOME will have to address.

    To be fair though, some distributions make significant contributions to GNOME, perhaps more than they take away through the change in affiliate codes.

    • Meneer R

      >However is distributions keep changing the referral codes, then GNOME will have to find alternative sources.

      Considering the fact that they block most, if not all, of Canonicals contributions, in favor of reimplentations by Red Hat employees, can’t Red Hat just finance this shell organisation of theirs themselves?

      >To be fair though, some distributions make significant contributions to GNOME, perhaps more than they take away through the change in affiliate codes.

      True. I honestly think the decision should lie with the Banshee developers. And i wouldn’t even mind if they tied the name ‘Banshee’ as a trademark to that policy. Like mozilla does with Firefox.

  • The-lz-himself

    What about a Rhythmbox AmazonMP3 plugin ?

  • http://twitter.com/jspaleta Jef Spaleta

    Yes it does appear to be fixed in recent versions.. but the point is it happened… and there’s never been a public statement by Canonical as far as I am aware where they say they’ll refrain from do that sort of thing again in the future.

    -jef

    • Meneer R

      Well considering that gnome pretty much blocks anything created or sponsored by Ubuntu this may be a good thing.

      I mean, Zeitgeist has a canonical developer as the main developer. So it’s not getting to Gnome.

      I mean, why pay Red Hat employees to reimplement what Canonical has already created? The gnome foundation seems to be just a shell for Red Hat’s influence.

  • Anonymous

    Get over it Jef, it’s making you old quickly.

  • Yi Sun-sin

    No, I don’t think it is fair that downstream distributor change the referral information. And I’m glad the distribution I use doesn’t. But I’m only buying physical copy, so Banshee doesn’t get any money, sadly.

    • Meneer R

      I agree with you. But the gnome foundation aren’t the very saint like either.

      I mean, those Red Hat employees that control Gnome keep blocking Canonical’s contributions. Now they are going to reimplement Indicators. They are going to work the exact same way, but the API has to be different. Zeitgeist is getting blocked as well.

      It just keeps going on and on. Maybe _this_ gnome foundation should run out of money. I mean, if all they do, is serve Red Hat interests to compete against Ubuntu, why should Canonical play nice?

      But they do. Cuz that’s who they are. Diplomats.
      I don’t really like diplomats, I think. They are not honest.

      And the gnome foundation at times deserves a more vocal treatment.

  • Yi Sun-sin

    I don’t think it would be good for the future of the project to be tied with one commercial partner which interest differs so much with those of the Gnome foundation.
    But it could be great if that could provide a substantial part of Gnome foundation’s income.

    • Meneer R

      >which interest differs so much with those of the Gnome foundation

      You mean differ so much from Red Hat? Or are you talking about some sort of gnome foundatation that is independent and accepts contributions from competitors of Red Hat? (other than financial off course)

  • http://twitter.com/jspaleta Jef Spaleta

    Gnome isn’t just getting referral money from Amazon. They have referral income from Magnatune already as well as a music retailer. And there’s nothing really preventing them from gaining a referral relationship with other music retailers like 7digital in the future. Don’t be shocked if you see direct 7digital store integration into upstream GNOME music applications in a year to match the Amazon music store exposure.

    -jef

    • Yi Sun-sin

      Yes, I was just answering to David’s question, at the end of his article ;â‹…).
      By the way, if they are funded only by music distributor, it could still be problematic. They could neglect other part of the desktop for music application, they could have a lot of pressure to implement DRMs,…
      (Err, neither of my examples seems realistic, but I think you’ve got my point)

  • https://launchpad.net/~davidnielsen David Nielsen

    I didn’t mean depending on Amazon alone, and Banshee itself isn’t even tied to one partner. There is the Ubuntu One Music Store which really is just a frontend for 7Digital, finally there is Magnatune integration but that doesn’t yet allow you to buy music as I recall.

    Also Magnatune largely switched to a subscription model which is better for users (IMHO) but isn’t very suitable for gaining income as affiliates I suspect (I don’t know the pittance they would share here but it isn’t likely to be much as Magnatunes subscription fees are already very low).

    However combined all the income chances we have for just taking a cut each time a user pays for content, would they ever be enough to fund the GNOME Foundation?

    I think it would be, and I am very encouraged to see that simply adding support in one application, during a development cycle, for one region (Sept. stats will be more interesting) can double our income. I imagine what else one could do.

  • Marklark

    Great, now they’ll have more money to spend on bureaucracy and marking valid bugs WONTFIX.

  • zekopeko

    You haven’t provided proof that it was changed on behest of Canonical and you fail to provide a compelling argument why they should refrain from doing such things in the future.

    • http://twitter.com/jspaleta Jef Spaleta

      I’m not trying to argue that any distributor should refrain. I’m saying that its going to be difficult for the GNOME Foundation to use this as a _reliable_ continuing source of revenue exactly because distributors can redirect referral revenue. Go back and read the parent article. I am answering the final question posed there. I bring up Canonical only because they are they only vendor I know of that has change the referral id in the past. Not because I want to pick on them, but to point out this isn’t theoretical. It has happened, and it will most likely happen again. Whether or not Canonical specifically will be the next vendor to do redirect referral revenue away from the GNOME foundation isn’t the point.

      There is only so much referral income to go around.

      We are headed for a situation where operating system distributors and upstream project devs are both going to be attempting to go after the same referral dollars. Ultimately GNOME and all other upstream efforts which do not act as their own distributors are are the mercy of the downstream distributors who build the final binaries and packages that users use and thus have the final say as to what the hard-wired referral information is (since this isn’t end-user configurable in an obvious way). As the amount of referral money rises the pressure for downstream distributors to tap it as a resource will rise as well making it exceedingly difficult for the GNOME Foundation to use it as a sustainable source of revenue.

      -jef

      • Meneer R

        Well, considering the Gnome foundation is mostly run by Red Hat and pretty much tries to serve their interests and tries to block any innovation coming Canonical, I can’t feel sorry for them if Canonical does this.

        I mean Gnome is now creating their own indicators; with a different API from Canonical. Zeitgeist is rejected. It just goes on and on.

        Maybe the gnome foundation needs to get shaken up a bit.

  • http://feathertail.dreamwidth.org/ Tachyon Feathertail

    You’re right that GNOME and other upstreams cannot rely on it when downstreams can change it.

    I think it’s less of a mistake for the downstreams to do this, though, and more of a mistake for GNOME to assume that downstream priorities will align with theirs.

    • https://launchpad.net/~davidnielsen David Nielsen

      Generally this would depend on the GNOME Foundations ability to prove it’s value. Something that I have personally been disappointed with, such as their dead end alliance with LiMo.
      Their non-participation in the ECMA process (considering that Mono is officially part of the process not being part of the talks regarding the standard that governs .NET is.. silly at best).
      Spending funding dollars helping employed established community members to go to GUADEC when we have a sea of students, and new faces whose need is likely greater and where spent funds would lead to more new GNOME developers.

      I say this being a Friend of GNOME and a general GNOME supporter.

      It would be a mistake for them to feel entitled this this income, they have to earn it. I would suggest they start now.

  • OMG!Umakemepuke!

    Can you just have a link to David Nielsen’s personal blog rather than having to read these promotion of mono apps articles all the time.

    • http://cldx.blogspot.com/ Joern Konopka

      Can you just skip articles that don’t interest you?

      Whoa, you’re right, this damn Mono is all over OMG!…not. What’s the matter? IF you wanna spill Mono-hate why don’t you do it at YOUR personal blog?

      Don’t you think a Blog that covers an OS should include all of it’s aspect without excluding parts of it only for the personal distaste of a subset of Visitors? How about we exclude all the GNOME News? Or maybe we should make them shut up talking about Clutter, cause, like, my Mom hates it? Get real.

      • OMG!Umakemepuke!

        Mono is all about money and short sighted greed and not the possible long term affects it may have on Linux.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/KMPHGHUPTWF44FRE33TFX74DFE Ankur S

    I’ve just realized that you guys haven’t written anything about docky in a while. That’s quite amazing considering when people were starting to call this site OMG!Docky

  • Meneer R

    >I can make a guess: they started to code something without any discussion on any mailing list, then the send it to Gnome, it was not something that Gnome was interested about, so it was rejected.

    You gues is based on prejudice, not truth.

    Take indicators. They started the discussion, gnome was not interested in participation. Then they implemented it themselves. Then gnome was still not interested.

    Now Gnome is going to reimplement the indicators, which will work the exact same way. But they will have a different, incompatible, API.

    At this point, the API for indicators is already accepted and part of KDE. So it already solves a lot of cross desktop issues.

    However, you would at least think, the Gnome Devs would explain why the current API is wrong. You know, provide an argument or something.

    Rather than just ignoring the existing setup and choosing to divert from an API that is already available, with working code for Gnome and KDE. And already accepted as part of KDE.

    That little action screams obstruction to me. It suggests, more than just merit based judgement is at play here.

    This whole census, they used to prove Canonical does not contribute. They used to smear them. But all it does is prove they are boycotting Canonical’s contributions.

    Like Zeitgeist. Like indicators.

    Ego’s are at play here.

    • Meneer R

      I mean, even when the Ubuntu devs choose to not use superior launchpad infrastructure and use gnome infrastructure, they are still blocked.

      And I honestly, think the infrastructure debate is moot. It’s not like launchpad is an island; it integrates with other bug trackers, including Gnome’s (because CANONICAL payed for them to upgrade their bugtracker so this would be possible)

 
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