Hello, I'm Jeff Mitchell, one of the Amarok authors. Nice to meet all of you. As you may know, Amarok has supported multiple music stores for some time. We have had one explicit music store -- Magnatune -- and the framework for more. We've been in talks with some other independent stores and so far no other store plugins have been created, but generally only for lack of investment by these stores (many of them tend to go out of business before they really get off the ground...such is the industry). Amarok gets a small cut of sales to Magnatune, which are reinvested in the project -- which is a non-profit entity incorporated under the SFC. I posed a question to Will Stephenson during Camp KDE, and I'd like to bring it up here today, in light of the Ubuntu One Music Store plugin finally being pushed in Rhythmbox (see http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzk5Ng ). The concept had been public before, but not much information has been available. Currently, the implementation is a plugin to Rhythmbox. It's unknown if they're going to try to push it into Rhythmbox trunk. Certainly there is a precedent for them to try: after all, we have the Magnatune music store, which as far as I know is included on all distributions of Amarok. There is of course a very large difference between the two -- the cut of track sales that Magnatune gives to Amarok goes to a non-profit entity and is used to fund developer sprints, pay our hosting costs and the like. As a result of this, no distribution seems to have a problem shipping the Magnatune code. Canonical however is a for-profit company. Other distributions shipping this plugin means that you're helping Canonical make their money for them, and I haven't heard of any method of Canonical sharing profit with other distributions. Why is this a problem? It isn't, necessarily -- but I do worry about the implications of for-profit distributions or projects or companies getting in a habit of pushing code upstream -- or on other distributions -- with the sole purpose of earning money (as opposed to earning money by improving FOSS and creating a more salable product). It seems like a fairly slippery slope. I'm not sure that Canonical will try to get this in Rhythmbox trunk, but I'm interested in knowing how openSUSE would respond in this case, if openSUSE might voluntarily ship this plugin, and the thoughts of the openSUSE community in general. Thanks, Jeff