The Amarok Bailout Bill

[Dan Meltzer]

No.

I work on Amarok for personal enjoyment, and to have a kickass music
player that I can use.  I do not own a mac, this interests me not at
all.  This is attempting to take the Amarok project in a direction
that is vastly different from the direction that made it succesful and
if this happens it likely will mean the loss of a large amount of our
current userbase (at least the idealists...)

Dan,

On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 9:28 PM, Orville Bennett <illogical1 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Oho. Wrong List.
> This should have been sent to the devel list instead, sending there to
> continue discussion.
>
> On Mar 7, 2009, at 8:05 PM, Orville Bennett wrote:
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>> Hey guys,
>> So I've fleshed out the idea a bit more and I've put my thoughts
>> down below. Just to make it clear this is just something I'm
>> throwing out there. We found ourselves in a bit of a bind with our
>> current financial position. Clearly there is a desire to, on some
>> fronts, to monetize Amarok. We already have commercial partners
>> where tentative deals are being negotiated, but nothing concrete (or
>> guaranteed). We also have the Magnatune initiative and the revenue
>> stream from Amazon via the covers.
>>
>> Unfortunately our main source of funds, the annual roktober
>> fundraiser, can't ensure we cover all costs. First we had to have a
>> fund raiser in the first place, then we had to extend it because we
>> didn't meet our target. Our other revenue streams such as Magnatune,
>> while great also don't offer a lot of solvency in the long term.
>>
>> Take Camp KDE for instance, it would have proven quite difficult to
>> cover the cost of our student developers up front (one of whom had
>> to fly in from the U.K.) if we wanted to. We still don't have the
>> mac developer machine we need, and if one is ever provided it looks
>> like it will be using out-of-pocket funds. Compounding this cash
>> flow shortage are our other developers and contributers who will
>> need help to go to upcoming conferences and developer sprints and
>> you can see that we're in trouble.
>>
>> In lieu of another fund raiser (because you know people are going to
>> ask what we're doing with "all that money" we got) I propose that we
>> instead go full blown on capitalizing on amarok. We have a lot of
>> buzz right now in the windows and macintosh communities and I
>> suggest we capitalize on that. The idea is that we focus on these
>> platforms (for the time being) and test the waters with providing
>> services to them for a nominal fee.
>>
>> Clearly the most obvious service we have to offer is amarok, both as
>> a platform (Soren's GTACFeat) and a service in itself (audio
>> manager). Running with this idea we have a bit of competition with a
>> well established base in the windows world (fubar2000, itunes and
>> yes, even winamp and WMP). On the mac side however, there is only
>> itunes, which as we all know, is a subpar product. Additionally the
>> mac has already built up, and is used to the idea of commercial
>> indie software.
>>
>> So there it is. I'm suggesting that we focus our currently limited
>> resources on delivering an awesome product to the mac platform.
>> We're actually almost there already and have only 3 major problems
>> left to deal with. _If_ we did commit to this, and put all our
>> resources into it and deliver an awesome product, I'm confident it
>> would pay off (quite literally) and allow us to then garner more
>> exposure, then users, then additional developers (remember when
>> winamp said they were going x-platform? if nothing else they got the
>> press and developers interested in helping).
>>
>> Just to make it clear, I'm not suggesting we turn this into a closed
>> source operation. The beauty of OS X is that the users there are
>> used to paying for a service, provided that this service is "worth
>> it". We'd be providing both a service (binaries, > itunes features)
>> AND a platform (scripting interface, services, superior to anything
>> else available plugin architecture). And we wouldn't have to
>> sacrifice much except the other platforms (for a while).
>>
>> Feel free to give your thoughts below.
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