The Amarok Bailout Bill

[Orville Bennett]

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As was pointed out on IRC, this was meant for the devel list.
So we'll take the discussion there.

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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