I was just wondering, did Amazon make some kind of donation to get this high-profile Ubuntu status? How did this come to pass? Curious about the financial situation there. Amazon's great don't get me wrong, I use it almost every day.
From techmansworld.com :
By default the Amazon icon is in the launcher, and it has an affiliate tag for Canonical to make money off of your purchases, to support the Ubuntu project. There is in fact settings to set whether you want your searches to be sent to online services (Amazon) or not.
From howtogeek.com:
When you perform any search in Unity’s dash, your search terms will be sent to Canonical. Canonical forwards these search terms to third parties, such as Amazon, on your behalf. This means that Amazon can’t tie your searches to you personally.
Canonical receives these search results from Amazon and sends them back to your computer, where they’re displayed in the dash.
From http://www.markshuttleworth.com:
We picked Amazon as a first place to start because most of our users are also regular users of Amazon, and it pays us to make your Amazon journey get off to a faster start. Typing Super “queen marking cage” Just Worked for me this morning. I am now looking forward to my game of Ultimate Where’s Waldo hunting down the queens in my bee colonies, Ubuntu will benefit from the fact that I chose to search Amazon that way, Amazon benefits from being more accessible to a very discerning, time-conscious and hotkey-friendly audience.
But there are many more kinds of things you can search through with Unity scopes. Most of them won’t pay Ubuntu a cent, but we’ll still integrate them into the coolest just-ask-and-you’ll-receive experience. I want us to do this because I think we can make the desktop better.
We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err.
My opinion:
So in general Amazon issue is intended to be profitable for everyone - You get better results while searching,Canonical gets paid to be able to write better software for users, Amazon gets better access for its customers.
