Posted on by Olav Vitters

Banshee and informing Ubuntu users

Note that Ubuntu users can be easily detected by their user-agent. Just check the user-agent string for ‘Ubuntu/’. Maybe we could put a ‘Friends of GNOME’-like banner on planet.gnome.org, www.gnome.org, and so on and politely request users to install a plugin/package to give the revenue back to the GNOME foundation again. The plugin could do this for Banshee, Amazon, Firefox Google search, etc in one go.

11 Replies to “Banshee and informing Ubuntu users”

  1. Interesting. I wonder how does it work in other distributions. It might help us to provide better information to our users. In the case of Ubuntu, it would also help in order to let the user know about GNOME 3 (gnome-shell) and how to get it working properly.

  2. Good idea.

    Although, for that to be a bit more feasible, we would require that every distribution had 1-click install like OpenSUSE does.

    Maybe Vuntz’s efforts to unify software management across distros would help to make this easier?

    1. See planet GNOME. Sales done through Banshee. Furthermore, if you do a Google search through Firefox, money either goes to Mozilla or to e.g. Ubuntu.

  6. If Canonical finds the useragent to be used in a way they think reduces polish, they’ll spoof it.

    1. Yeah, it used to work. Now the userstring in Firefox on Ubuntu’s 11.04 development release is something like: “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0b12”

  8. “Give back?” Ubuntu didn’t really take anything did it?

    GNOME received nothing from most Ubuntu users prior to this and suddenly will not only gain that share (though yes a smaller one) from both Amazon but also from Canonical’s Music store. GNOME loses nothing here.

    I love the GNOME project but requesting that one specific upstream project’s users give proceeds to you is just silly. Target everyone and you will get better results. Maybe add some specific targeting for many individual distros?

    I would also like to add that GNOME is not solely responsible for the Ubuntu project and thus should not claim that all revenue should be shared solely with the foundation.

    1. They’re taking 75%. Canonical is the only distribution which doing this.

      Now seems you’ve overlooked that:
      1) I said ‘politely request’
      2) request means it is optional
      3) you argue about the Ubuntu project, I’m talking about Banshee
      4) I want to give users choice to determine what is done with a part of the revenue that is given when they purchase something

      Only Canonical is doing something different.

      Calling something ‘silly’ is an opinion btw. Lacks any argument. If you want to have an discussion, please make arguments so I can respond.

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