Linked by Hadrien Grasland on Tue 1st Mar 2011 18:32 UTC, submitted by sjvn
"The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what should be done with Banshee's Amazon Store revenue stream, while it was finally resolved, was not Ubuntu's most shining moment. At the matter's conclusion, Banshee developers were not happy with the results. This is not how open-source communities should work together and no one knows that better than Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, who wrote, "We made some mistakes in our handling of the discussion around revenue share with the Banshee team.""
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Member since:2010-03-30
Of course, you are totally right; that's a kind of freedom that free software allows. Canonical could perfectly do what they wanted without asking permission from anyone.
The thing is they are doing it in a way that amounts (in my eyes) to basically forcing the Banshee team to condone what they (Canonical) knew would have cost them brownie points if they did it behind closed doors. It might have caused even more brouhaha than what has been caused by that dispute. Looks like they're aiming for a "we did that thing you think is ethically wrong but hey, they agreed!". That's weird. There was an apparently less enticing and effective third option for Canonical: leave the Banshee source code alone.
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[snip]
Isn't this exactly the problem: that this argument can be used in reverse. The Banshee developers have chosen to release their code under an MIT/X11 licence, so they can't really complain if someone takes their code and uses it however they want (within the restrictions of the licence). It's presumably not like the Banshee team didn't know what they were getting in to.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the strong ethical argument that says the Banshee team deserve to get something back for their efforts. It's just they've explicitly made clear (in their licence) that they don't mind people taking this revenue instead. Please do correct me if I'm wrong though.
Any argument that says the Banshee team deserve revenue for their effort surely applies to anyone who adds to the value chain that ends with someone downloading a track? If I'm understanding Mark Shuttleworth's argument, he says this now includes Canonical.