1.5 - gnome-packagekit?

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Walter Bender wrote:
> Slightly off topic, but reading between the lines, it seems there is
> something more fundamentally broken here. 5000 packages. The Apple app
> store adds that many new "apps" every week it seems. Why aren't there
> 5 million packages available instead of just 5000? 

Money.  The App Store is proprietary software.  You have to buy it, and
some of that money goes to the author.  People write apps because they
hope to make money from it.  In contrast, we are reliant on the charitable
motives of software engineers, which restricts us to some (particularly
noble!) subset.

Note that the incentive is not particularly to write _new_ software.  You
can duplicate the functionality of someone else's app and just hope to
grab a piece of the market for that function.  The incentive is also not
particularly to write useful software; it's to write software that someone
will pay for.

In terms of useful functionality provided, I suspect Fedora's repo does at
least as well as the App Store, and maybe a lot better.

--Ben