The Amarok Bailout Bill

[Seb Ruiz]

2009/3/8 Orville Bennett <illogical1 at gmail.com>:
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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.

Are you saying that we should consider selling the product binaries on
Windows/Mac?

This is ludicrous.


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-- 
Seb Ruiz

http://www.sebruiz.net/
http://amarok.kde.org/