Linux Mint Swap Banshee Affiliate Code, Take 100% of Profits

OMG! Linux Mint stole $ 3.41 from the gnome fundation! Those guys even wrote the extensions that are now bringing gnome 3 into spotlight, and now you come with a 3.41 dollars fraud… Blogging at its best!

Please try the original URL. It IS in fact dead. And the Mint guy is willing to give the $4 he made so far to upstream (Ubuntu or Banshee).

It WAS popular because it was ubuntu with gnome 2.

If it weren’t for Canonical/Ubuntu, Mint wouldn’t exist!

Chosen the path of taking money?

It’s just an example. My daughter, wife, and every other Ubuntu user I know think the same way. Nobody is talking about killing nothing, but they all agree that it sucks.
Also, reading other blogs and sites (ie slashdot) it’s clear that i’m not alone. I can tell that “unity” is almost an oxymoron in this case.
And your reaction has some denial in it.

Mint does not force you to use duckduckgo.  You are free to change it to another search engine if you like.

I agree, but I like the Linux Mint iteration a LOT more. =)

again!

“again!” C-c-c-combo breaker!

Post modded -1 OffTopic

oh no you didn’t!

Wooooooooooooooooosh. Missed the point.

In soviet OMG!, I’m jealous of you.

banshee is windows media player for linux and both are bloated

people should really not let distro devs adopt things without giving credits back, even in Linux world. For Mint version 12, it took a lot with little acknowledgement. For other versions, I don’t know.

He said “I don’t want any money or help coming from Israel or people who support it” and never took it back. He mixed software and politics. Fortunately linux is about choices, and the moment I learned about it, I moved to Debian/Ubuntu/Puppy (Just as Clement suggested, I mean no disrespect to him).

OK great :))

I’ve no problem with this change. If we spot other Canonical codes we haven’t spotted before, we’ll switch them or remove them as well. You’ll find these in the changelogs and I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we won’t bother you with a blog announcement every time a code which shouldn’t be there has been fixed.

We fixed a bug in mgse-windowlist today and as you can see there’s no announcement about it. There’s no scandal about us fixing it “behind the scene” either, is there?

Let’s stop the nonsense with this and the waste of time with fud-like threats. If you think there’s any malice in this, you’re mistaken. This is not hidden, this not unethical, this is us fixing a bug. Banshee in Linux Mint 11 points to Amazon using a tag from Canonical. That’s a bug. The solution: We put our own tag. Another solution (if we didn’t have a tag): We remove the tag and point directly at Amazon.

We were clear about the search market and our policy. We’ve always been clear about our business plan and our strategy and this falls exactly under the same category. I’m sorry you find it so “secretive”, I’m seriously shocked by the way you consider changelogs, but that’s fine.

Let me say this in a VERY non-secretive way:

IF WE FIND ANY REVENUE STREAM IN LINUX MINT WHICH IS GENERATED BY OUR USERS WE TAKE CONTROL.

Then after that, I’ve no problem entering partnerships and sharing the revenue, but don’t expect us to look at a Canonical affiliate tag and say “oh yeah, that’s fine, let’s not fix that”. It’s got nothing to do in Mint and so we either replace or remove it.

This by the way is crystal clear. You can try and depict Mint as a malicious project which does everything behind close doors, only as you can see, I’m here on this blog, spending my time just to give you more information instead of actually working on what needs to be done. I don’t think we’re secretive with Mint, in fact I think we’re quite transparent in the way we do things.

I don’t remember ever telling somebody “no comment” after being asked a question. Here, I’m asked nothing, I just get warned by a user that there’s some FUD going on OMGUbuntu.co.uk, and here I am commenting.

If Banshee wants in on the $4/month they need to come to us. If they do they’ll get more than 25%. In the meantime we fix bugs, we implement changes, we update changelogs and when we’re asked something we answer.

It’s simple. It’s clear. It’s consistent.
 
And when you say: “you will be held accountable. FOSS doesn’t mean
boundaries of ethical conduct can be freely crossed”

I agree 100%. Ethics and accountability are there, you’ve got me right in front of you, providing lengthy explanations to something relatively unimportant and there’s nothing wrong with either our policy on this or the change itself.

Somehow that still wont’ be enough for those who enjoy scandals and controversies. That’s ok, I guess. But at least now you’ve got our point of view. I don’t hide things away, I don’t engage in “crossing the boundary of ethical conduct” as you put it so well, and whatever affiliate code  I find in Linux Mint, unless we’ve got an agreement about it, I’ll consider it a bug.

As I usually do when commenting on another blog, and mostly because I won’t be here to follow the conversation, I’d like to invite anyone who still has queries (for instance, I noticed somebody mentioning that localization wasn’t done properly in our implementation, and I agree, that needs fixing) to contact me by email: root @ linuxmint . com.

Good luck, if you’re shocked by this, make your own mind, read through it and don’t hesitate to contact me if anything still isn’t clear. It’s not the first time we’re put under scrutiny and I’ve no problem explaining myself.

Secretive unethical changes hidden in a changelog… rofl, what a great scandal!! :)

The change itself –> business plan, policy on revenue sharing, branding (also, cause it’s from Ubuntu)

The secretive changelog scandal –> you can’t be serious :))

“No sane user will download and read the changelog of an app, let alone the source code.”

Sorry, but “tl;dr” is not, nor has it ever been, a valid argument, rationale or justification.  In fact, your reasoning here may well be the very cause of this “controversy” to begin with, as all the information anyone seemed to bother invoking is a forum post by a total stranger on a World-Wide Web full of bullsh*t.  The fact that anyone would disregard original sources while relying on the sketchiest secondary one is unsettling, even more so when people take whatever interpretation that secondary source has and simply run with it unquestioningly.  It’s also annoying to see that the attitude of some people is still rooted in blind faith, trusting that the software they download strictly adheres to their personal ethics without bothering to ever confirm such a belief (at least not in any way other than taking some nobody’s word for it).

An incident somewhat similar to this arose in the TinyCore community this past summer and lightly touched other Linux communities, when it was discovered that an individual was distributing LiveCD images on Sourceforge without crediting the original creators.  The whole thing looked shady, as the (probably misguided) person was taking the disc images and creating new MD5 sums, suggesting that alterations to the base code may have been made.  Ultimately no evidence of any wrongdoing or malicious intent was found, and people simply went back to business as usual.  In the meantime, however, the creator and lead dev of TinyCore decided to make crucifying this person his personal crusade; things didn’t turn out pretty, and the whole ordeal devolved into an asinine witch hunt.

While the manner in which these alterations to Banshee may be subject to debate, a simple point remains: If one wishes not to have one’s own software altered in such a way as to benefit those making such alterations, then one has no business releasing the source code to the public under the GNU Public License.  Or is the license also too long and dry a read for you?

“Finally, it is not Joey’s responsibility to find out why you did what you did”

wait what?

“I don’t remember any outcry when Canonical changed the link to divert
75% of the (presumably much larger) revenue stream to themselves, to be
honest (that information is published in the changelogs, too).”

What color is the rock you just crawled out from under?

There is only one word to describe such action: THEFT.
– Google Translate

That definition leaves us with exactly zero Linux distros that’s not parasitic.
Carlos, please don’t drag this down.

>> Why is clear to you that all the revenues generated by these users
should be collected by the Mint team (‘taken control of’ in your
terminology)?

totally agree, Clem and his team sounds like they want to control everything, even taking the hard work of banshee and disregarding their intention to donate 100% gnome foundation.

Valid point. We talked to Banshee and this is now explained at http://banshee.fm/about/revenue/.

I understand that you might think it’s important but I really think that’s because of this controversy. We spent a lot of time explaining our business model on the search market to our community and this falls right within the same scope. At the time of the release no revenue sharing was decided and this particular stream wasn’t important (in comparison to the search market), we neglected it. Also in terms of figures, this 50% is made public, but most agreements or partnerships are under NDA, so when we talked about this to the Mint community it was more about the policy than actual numbers. Whether it’s with DDG, Google, Ask.com, Opera..etc we don’t and we can’t communicate numbers.

If we were to make a poll on our user base right now, I’m pretty sure most people don’t know there’s a revenue stream there, they don’t know it used to go to Canonical (75%) and Gnome (25%), they don’t know it’s now equally shared between Mint and Gnome, and they probably don’t care. What many of them know though, because we made that very clear and we explained it prior to Mint 12 being released, is that the reason we’re able to focus on the development is because we’re funded by our community and the traffic they generate, they also know and we made it clear, that we were getting on the search market and that all revenue streams which income was generated by them was going to be monetized by us.

By monetized, I don’t mean not sharing. I mean making 3rd parties share with us. This is happening and will happen with all search engines and all stream revenues. That’s our business model, that’s how we grow, remain free, and focus on our development. And that is important, and that was explained a lot. The Banshee revenue stream falls into that, but it’s completely incidental.

On the implementation itself, it’s not fully decided yet. First step was to remove the Canonical URL, that’s done. Now we need to fix the localization (we weren’t aware of that prior to the release). We’re talking to Banshee about this. Either we implement it ourselves and share the revenue with GNOME, or we point to Banshee and they share the revenue with Linux Mint. Either way we’re looking at a 50% share each way (Banshee doesn’t want to share, we personally don’t care about the money for such a small revenue, but that’s by principle, we want to participate in all revenue streams which use the traffic generated by Mint users, we decided that for the search market primarily, but it applies the same way here. The reason it’s 50% is because that’s an equal share and because money isn’t at stake here, just the principle).

Anyway, to get back to the question you raised. We “owe” it to our users to have clear answers when questions are asked or to provide the information they need. For this to be announced it needs to be significantly relevant to most users. With this controversy, sadly, it’s getting there.. but for the wrong reasons.

So we might be pragmatic and make an announcement to clear things up, or we might get stubborn and decide that FUD and controversy shouldn’t impact the way we do things.

Let’s sleep on it and make that decision away from the tension, because the audience that announcement would be written for, aren’t (for the most part) interested in either conflicting arguments or commercial aspects and most of them don’t know and/or don’t care about this controversy. What they would not understand is why I’m spending time on this when the KDE edition they’re waiting for still isn’t released… that’s what really matters in the Linux Mint community right now, and that’s what I should really be working on.

The Amazon MP3 store isn’t something every Mint user uses, cares or even knows about. If you remove the controversy aspect and the passion and anger people have here on this blog, it becomes quite insignificant.

Mint users have been using Banshee and giving it a 75% cut to Canonical without knowing it for quite a while now. That’s not something we ever announced or explained. In fact that’s not something we even really knew or thought about at the time. Now they’re giving more to GNOME than before, they’re not giving to Canonical anymore but to Mint. Is it something that’s important? Not really. Is it positive and would they be happy to know it? Maybe. But not with this controversy. Not when you’re accused of stealing, of hiding things, or making changes behind people’s back, or even in “playing it down” (as I’m reading now) or in saving the face with a share after “being caught with the cookie jar” (I read that as well here). That’s not nice, it’s not positive, and it’s not what we seek when working on Linux Mint.

I’m proud of what I do, and so is the team. I don’t regret that change, and I’ll change any other Ubuntu tags I see. You might think it’s wrong and important, but I don’t.

We’re close to our community and we respect it. We work the same way since 2006. To communicate with our community we make announcements. To keep track of changes we maintain changelogs. A changelog is neither hidden or published. For upgrades it’s shown to users in the Update Manager, but most of the time it’s for us, developers, to keep track of what changes were made. You can see that change in the changelog and we made no announcement about it…. not because it’s hidden (if it was it wouldn’t be in the changelog, would it?) but because it’s not important.

To you, here, it is. To us it isn’t.

PS: When this same controversy hit Canonical I barely paid attention to it. I’ve no interest for the scandals in the Linux community. Mono, Ubuntu, etc.. it’s not constructive. Now it’s affecting us, and I’m spending time answering questions and scrutiny. That’s fine, we’re accountable and it’s important to protect our image when people harm it. I still don’t think the change and the revenue stream are important though.