The Amarok Bailout Bill

Nikolaj Hald Nielsen nhnfreespirit at gmail.com
Sun Mar 8 10:20:19 CET 2009


I think this is a _really_ bad idea.

The very point that we are completely open and Free and gratis is what
I believe will eventually make this project very successful. I really
do believe that we are close to some sort of tipping point. Between
Magnatune ( the actual commission for sales is currently not very
large, but the time they have sponsored for me to work on Amarok
amounts to significant $ ), the Jukebox project which is picking up
speed and additional Amarok devs and a few other stores that wants to
work with us ( as soon as we find someone to actually do the work.
They will pay btw. ) I think Amarok has the potential to generate a
significant cash flow in the not too distant future. Getting solid
Windows and Mac versions will help a lot in this respect.

For the time being, this might amount to just having people paid by
company X to work on Amarok, but if we get solid integration with more
music stores ( the ones we are in talks with have very large catalogs
with mainstream music ) this ill change, perhaps even allow the Amarok
project to hire a few full time developers.

So, in summary: bad idea. And I really don't think such a drastic step
is needed. Lets trade on our strengths and openness instead of
throwing all that away.

- Nikolaj

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 6:25 AM, Dan Meltzer
<parallelgrapefruit at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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