GNOME was founded by two Mexicans and currently seems to be predominantly dominated by people from the United States, with the foundation itself being based in the States. The most important companies behind it, RedHat and Novell, are both from the United States too.

Ubuntu was started and Canonical was founded by a South African based in London, where the company has its headquarters. Although there is again a very high American presence within the community and company, the leadership is much more eclectic than GNOME’s. Furthermore, the Canonical Design Team seems to be predominantly British.

Why would this matter? Our differences aren’t very large after all, the open source community is dominated (unfortunately) by white, Caucasian males and they have a lot in common. I think it may play a more important role than we have thought so far. Communication is very culture-bound and it seems that it is communication that has been causing most of the problems.

If we look at the rejection of ‘libappindicator’ as an external dependency, we may be able to see this more clearly. Canonical, say some people in the GNOME project, failed to push its inclusion thoroughly enough. They may have done what was formally required, but didn’t show the initiative that could have resolved the issues that were raised. They say that you need to find the right people to talk to, not expect a machinery to process your request once you’ve delivered an appropriately tagged package.

Canonical reiterates that it did what was required to propose a module as an external dependency. They say that they want to have someone to talk to, to have someone in charge who makes the decisions and can be phoned up if necessary.

Both parties expected different things from the other. This may be what caused the unease. Each party feels that it did enough and the other too little, so no one is to blame.

Strikingly, it seems that the cooperation concerning the application indicators/status notifiers with KDE—founded in Germany, its foundation still being based there—was very productive. Was this because of the persons involved, or because of the cultures? The communication ways I described above do seem to reflect the stereotypes of the two continents.

What should be said that the above is a gross generalisation. Generalisations can usually only be used, with great care, when you talk about large groups. In this case it might be better to talk about individuals instead.

I don’t think that what I said above is the whole explanation. I do think, though, that it is something we should keep in our minds. It may not only have played a role in worsening the unease and misunderstanding here, but it affects all communities that are truly diverse. Traditionally, FOSS seems to have been dominated predominantly by people from the US. Now that is changing, more people learn English—as an example, my father’s generation learned German, not English, as the most important foreign language at Dutch secondary school, for me it is English—and ‘developing’ countries are catching up.

Cultural differences will be more visible in communities, we need to be aware of the different ways different cultures communicate if we want to make sure no contributions go to waste.

The case

Banshee’s Amazon MP3 store plugin was developed by Banshee star-developer Aaron Bockover, who announced on his blog last August that all revenue of the plugin would go to the GNOME Foundation. The plugin consists of two separate extensions, one for integrating music importing from Amazon’s MP3 store into Banshee, the other for embedding the store’s website. Both are open source, and available from Banshee’s GIT branch.

After discussions between Canonical and the Banshee developers, Jono Bacon announced on his blog that the final settlement was that Canonical would receive 75% of the revenue of both music stores, and direct 25% to the GNOME Foundation. Some people were outraged by Canonical taking such a large share of the revenue, arguing that the company was simply profiting from the work of others.

When are you allowed to sell?

I want to investigate this issue by going from the bottom up. Let us first establish why we pay money. We can’t do everything ourselves, because we don’t have infinite time and skills. Therefore we use the services of others, and pay them in exchange for what they produce. That money allows them to buy the products of others, so they can focus fully on their job. Money is thus awarded for a service.

In open source, most of the time you will not have to pay for the software. However, the GPL license does not prohibit selling your software. The Free Software Foundation defines free software not as ‘gratis’ software, but says software is free when a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes. (Read its piece on selling (free) software if you want to know more.)

When are you entitled to sell?

You pay money in exchange for a service. In the case of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, Amazon gives a share of the revenue to Banshee, as a reward for bringing users to its store. Banshee subsequently chooses to give the revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Note that it is not the end-user who is the customer here, but Amazon!

Under the current plans, the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin on Ubuntu will give Canonical 75% of the money paid by Amazon and the revenue of the Ubuntu One Music Store. The GNOME Foundation, via Banshee, will get 25% of both. I shall focus on the Amazon MP3 plugin. There are two ways to look at this. The first way is to consider Banshee an involuntary customer of Canonical, buying the service ‘broader access to customers’. The win for them is more income. The second way is to consider Amazon a customer of both Banshee and Canonical, who jointly provide the service Amazon pays for.

How does this happen? The Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin, developed by the Banshee project, is the direct means used to make the Amazon MP3 Store available. Other important factors are the attractiveness of Banshee—courtesy of its developers—and distribution via Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution on the desktop.

We have seen that both Canonical and the Banshee project deliver a part of the service that Amazon pays for. Canonical is the final distributor, bringing the product to the customers’ doorsteps, Banshee can be compared to a more specialised producer, providing a specific product to the distributor. If we look at the real world, we can see that it is often the distributor at the end of the chain that determines the prices. Farmers, for example, earn often very little for their crops. Most of the revenue on produce goes to the supermarkets that distribute the goods to the customers. Supermarkets may not be the sole method of reaching customers, but they are by far the most important channel; the farmer depends on the supermarkets. This simple fact allows the stores to dictate the prices. It is an economic law that says that when a good—in this case access to the customer—is scarce, the costs will go up. Here it means the costs for the farmer will go up in the way of lower revenues.

Canonical can be compared to the ‘Superunie’, the joint procurement organisation of the major Dutch supermarkets. Like supermarkets, it doesn’t actually make everything it offers itself. Instead, it is responsible for the selection, integration and fine-tuning of the components, and maybe for baking the fresh baguettes. Its large market share in the Linux desktop world gives it a lot of power. Some people are principally opposed to it and say it abuses its power.

Access to many potential customers makes Canonical’s contribution to the ‘service’ provided to Amazon much, much more important. It is very likely that 25% of the Banshee Amazon MP3 plugin’s revenue when enabled by default will be higher, than 100% of the same plugin disabled by default. The service of enabling the plugin by default is therefore a valuable ‘product’, which is sold to the Banshee project at a not unsubstantial price.

This high price can be justified by the fact that Canonical is selling a scarce good to the Banshee project. However, Banshee has little choice than to accept whatever benevolent offer Canonical deigns to make. Because they’ve chosen for a free license, there is no real transaction to be made. If Canonical doesn’t like what Banshee demands, then it can just replace the affiliate code and keep everything for itself. Banshee is powerless. That is the difference with the farmer-supermarket analogy, in which the farmer can decide to reject and offer and not give his or her produce.

So, what  amount can you ask for this substantial additional value? It is impossible to determine the true economic price of it when only one side can make demands. The 75:25 ratio is therefore not a representation of the true values of what both sides have to offer, but instead the representation of what the only party with any power over the matter considers the values to be. It is a subjective determination.

Whether or not you agree with the chosen ratio depends what value you attribute to the services provided by Canonical and by the Banshee project to Amazon. It is not possible to do this fully objective, and in any case you need extra data to say something definitive.

To me the demands from Canonical don’t seem very unreasonable at all. The value of the huge user share Ubuntu has to offer seems to be worth the 75% slice at first glance. However, we’ll first have to see the statistics from the Amazon MP3 plugin in action on Ubuntu to verify this assumption. If it turns out that Ubuntu brings in a lot of revenue, then the 75% fee is justified. If it turns out that the revenue is relatively low, or average, then Canonical’s share should be lowered to compensate for the proven lower value of the ‘service’ offered by the company. I would propose to do this check not too long after the launch of Ubuntu 11.04, make the results public and swiftly announce change when change is justified.

What do you think? Do you agree with my conclusion? Did you spot any mistake? Please leave a comment!

Maybe you’ve already heard about the Dutch plans to make open standards almost mandatory for the (semi-)governmental organizations.
Although the regulation was already effective as from the first of April 2008, recently there have been some developments. Now the plans have been approved by the European Commission. Furthermore, the use of open standards is now even closer to mandatory; if a (semi-)governmental organization wants to use a closed standard now, they have to have a very good justification. Also see the Dutch announcement at the website of the Department of Economic Affairs: Instructies rond gebruik open standaarden.

The government also created a website called Forum Standaardisatie, where information is published that could help the differentment parts of the government to choose the right standard. You can find the English version at http://www.forumstandaardisatie.nl/english/, but keep in mind that most of the data is in Dutch.

Why did I create an idea at Brainstorm for this? When the costs of a tender of a (semi-)governmental organization in the EU exceeds a certain border, the organization HAS to allow all companies in the EU to fulfil the order. The tender is published with the European tender system at http://ted.europa.eu/ and all companies in Europe can send their offer.

Now a large part of the Dutch government probably is going to switch to open standards, there will probably a lot of tenders about switching. If Canonical would try to participate here, Ubuntu could be the OS running parts of our government! Compability shouldn’t be a problem since open standards are required. If Microsoft won’t support them properly, I have no doubt that Neelie Kroes would do something to that…

However, Ubuntu should also get some more fame in the Netherlands so the people in charge of picking the candidate for the tender know what they can choose. Here lies a task for Ubuntu NL. I think it would be a good idea to watch the media carefully and try to fix mistakes in case they make mistakes and notice them when there is a major Ubuntu event, like a new release or maybe even the UDS.

I hope this suggestion would at least be considered since it could be the change for Linux to get a lot of new users. Another plus would be that being used by a government increased the will to support you.