[Rhythmbox-devel] Amazon DRM Free Music Store

[Jeff Craig <lists foxxtrot net>]

I suppose it's about time I properly introduce myself on the mailing
list.  My name is Jeff Craig, and I have been an avid Linux user almost
ten years, and a user of GNOME for most of that.  While I've always been
interested in Open Source development, I've only just recently made the
strong commitment to actually do it, and have begun that work with
Rhythmbox, having submitted a few patches.

Anyway, with the announcement of the Amazon DRM Free Music Store, I saw
an opportunity to have a plugin that allows Rhythmbox users to get
mainstream music that is DRM free, and we should be able to plug it in,
similarly to the Magnatune plugin.  I've done a bit of reading about
Amazon's Web Services, and filed a bug requesting this feature:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480633

I've been doing some thinking about how to go about working on this, and
it appears the E-Commerce service will do most of what we will need,
provided it interfaces with the Beta music store, of course.  One part
of this service that I noticed that seemed potentially interesting was
the integration with the Amazon Associates program, which allows
Affiliates to earn up to 10% of customer purchases.  This raised an
interesting question to myself, that I wanted to bring to the list.
While we can use the E-Commerce Service without the Affiliate Program,
would it be worthwhile trying to set up the GNOME Foundation (the best
recipient, in my opinion) as an Affiliate, and have referral fees from
this plugin go to the Foundation?  Or would the potential for abuse that
this could introduce be more than we want to worry about?  

I wanted opinions on this from Rhythmbox developers before I brought the
idea to the Foundation lists, since if the maintainers of Rhythmbox
don't want this aspect of the feature, it isn't worth bringing up.  So,
I guess the question of the day is: Would it be okay to create a plugin
that, through it's use, could help support the GNOME Foundation without
costing the user anything?

Jeff Craig