The Amarok Bailout Bill

[Orville Bennett]

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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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