It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

Relying on the good graces of the user population hasn't prevented them from integrating Amazon advertisements, and won't likely prevent other bad decisions in the future.

Your comment reminded me of other Ubuntu incident - when they were stealing profit from Banshee (they changed banshee's amazon ref id to ubuntu's).

it's a bit presumptious to say who "owns" that profit, as both pieces are open source software that depend on each other for the music experience.

Without the Banshee developers, Ubuntu wouldn't have Banshee to ship, so it's not particularly debatable who deserves the lion's share. Especially considering Ubuntu's incredibly weak contributions to open source in general. What Ubuntu did there was tacky. If they had handled it better (discussing it with upstream and working out a profit sharing scheme), at least it would've been slightly less disgusting.

They did the same with Firefox.

> It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

How would they do that without breaking user experience? (and gpl licence).

GPL has zero influence. Please do the barest of research into licensing before invoking the GPL boogieman.