Shuttleworth's argument about javastubanshee: an error has been made.

The conflict between Banshee and Canonical about how the income sources of the Banshee Amazon store should be resolved, but it is not the most shining moment of Ubuntu. At the end of the incident, Banshee developers were not satisfied with the results. This is not the result of how the open-source community should work together, and no one knows that it is more accurate than the parent companies of MarkShuttleworth, Canonical, and Ubuntu, 'we are dealing with the Banshee team about revenue share.

The conflict between Banshee and Canonical about how the income sources of the Banshee Amazon store should be resolved, but it is not the most shining moment of Ubuntu. At the end of the incident, Banshee developers were not satisfied with the results. This is not the result of how the open-source community should work together, and no one knows who writes it more correctly than Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, and Ubuntu's parent company, 'The team has made some mistakes in dealing with revenue shares. '

The conflict between Banshee and Canonical over what shocould 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 shocould 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."

In his blog, which Shuttleworth often uses to discuss matters of importance to Ubuntu, open-source, and Linux in general, he started, "Money is special contentious in a community that mixes volunteer and paid effort, we shocould have anticipated and been extra careful to have the difficult conversations that were inevitable up front and public, at UDS [Ubuntu Developer Summit], when we were talking about the possibility of Banshee being the default media player in Ubuntu. we didn't, and I apologize for the consequential confusion and upset caused."

Shuttleworth then explained where Canonical comes from in creating its policy towards handling revenue from its distribution and the open-source programs that it's made from. "The bulk of the direct cost in creating the audience of Ubuntu users is carried by Canonical. there are available, could indirect costs and contributions that are carried by others, both inside the Ubuntu community and in other communities, without which Ubuntu wocould not be possible. but that doesn't diminish the substantial investigation made by Canonical in a product that is in turn made available free of charge to millions of users and developers."

He continued. "The business model which justifies this investigation, and which we hope will ultimately sustain that effort for the desktop without dependence on me, is that your-generating services which are optional for users provide revenue to Canonical. this enables us to make the desktop available in a high quality, fully maintained form, without any royalties or license fees. by contrast, every other extends cial Linux desktop is a licensed product-you can't legally use it for free, the terms for binaries are similar to those for Windows or the Mac OS. they're entitled to do it their way, we think it's good in the world that we choose to do it our way too."

At the same time, "We know that we need a healthy and vibrant ecosystem of application developers. we think services shoshould work for them too, and we're committed to sharing revenue with them. we want to be entirely aligned in our interests: better code means a better result for both of us; better revenue means more resources to do what we love even better. our interests, and upstream interests, shocould be perfectly aligned in this. so we have consistently had the view that revenue we can attribute to a participant upstream shoshould create a revenue share for that upstream. we support Mozilla in this way, for example. the numbers are not vast, but nor are they insubstantial, and while we are not obliged to do so, we do so happily."

To sum up, "Canonical seeks to earn revenue from services delivered to Ubuntu, and we will share a portion of that revenue with relevant projects who help make that possible. our interests, and those of the projects, shocould be aligned to the greatest extent possible."

So what happened? Shuttleworth explained, "In engaging with Banshee leads at UDS, we shoshould have been absolutely clear about our expectations and commitment. apparently, we weren't, and for that I apologize. there was certainly no conspiring or maliciousness, it apparently just never came up. but it was my expectation that we wocould share revenue with Banshee, I mentioned it briefly to someone closer to the conversation, but I failed to follow up until I heard rumours of a potential disagreement on the subject in recent days."

As it happened, I was at that UDS. I wasn't present for the Banshee and Ubuntu discussions, but I did speak to both Ubuntu and Banshee developers immediately afterwards about this and other changes to the forthcoming Ubuntu 11.04 release. at no time did anyone mention any details about revenue sharing between the projects. I stronugly suspect that Shuttleworth is right in saying that the matter just never came up.

That may sound amazing to business people, but I assure you it's not surprising at all. in their heart of hearts, Canonical and Banshee are both made up of programmers, not accountants. these are people who think of code first and second and business contractual relationships, if at all, last. this serves as an object lesson about why, even with the best intentions in the world, open-source projects need business-savvy people around und to make sure this kind of mistake isn' t made and then allowed to snowball.