Juan J. Martínez used to talk here about Open Source and Other Things.
This is a blog in archive mode, you can read new posts at en_GB@blog
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From @migueldeicaza.
I don’t share the view of Miguel in a lot of topics, and this is obviously a humorous comment, but reading Banshee In Natty To Ship Multiple Stores And Contribute To GNOME Foundation and Canonical’s New Plan for Banshee, I must admit he nailed it.
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From Banshee Supporting GNOME on Ubuntu (please, read the post… the revenue of Banshee’s Amazon store currently goes 100% to Gnome project).
Basically it’s news because the Banshee team declined a 25% revenue share offering from Canonical for not disabling the Amazon store in Banshee.
The distributor is very important, we all agree with that, but they’re distributing free software developed by others, under the Ubuntu brand; so I’m not sure where are the limits for the strategies that Canonical can use to make Ubuntu profitable (for them).
One could argue that this is not that important, because the store is supposed to be easily enabled back, but if it’s not important, why are they going to disable it in the first place?
Today, any user can install Banshee in Ubuntu (can someone confirm that the store is enabled?); so we’re talking about the importance of the applications installed by default.
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From Renaissance man: Legal.
The main reason behind that decision seems to be making possible code sharing between F-Spot (a GPL licensed application) and Banshee (MIT/X11 license). F-Spot was able to get Banshee code, but Banshee wasn’t without moving to GPL.
So the solution seems to be moving F-Spot into a more permissive license, that IMHO it’s a wrong move.
F-Spot is still open source, and I don’t think that will change anything from users point of view (at least short term), but if the argument it’s hey, it’s still free… you FSF Taliban!
, I wonder if there’s a reason to not move Banshee into GPL.
One weak point of Foresight Linux is the almost inexistent documentation. Add to this fact a very bad searching feature in the package manager, and you got it: it’s hard to find how to play a simple MP3 with Banshee.
May be it’s because I’m used to aptitude and the high standards of the Ubuntu’s documentation, but every time I need to install something with conary… it’s a nightmare.
After some googling I’ve realized that the gstreamer plugins are packaged as gst-plugin-* (you won’t find them searching for gstreamer plugin
; d’oh!). With following command, you’ll be able to play MP3 files:
$ sudo conary update gst-plugins-ugly
I’ve recommended Foresight Linux Mobile to some notebook users, but I’m starting to think Foresight Linux isn’t ready yet.
Update: I’ve added an entry in the FAQ.
