1.5 - gnome-packagekit?

[Walter Bender]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Seth Woodworth <seth at isforinsects.com> wrote:
>> 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?
>>
> Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote:
>> Money.  The App Store is proprietary software.
>
> Furthermore, the App Store has strong incentives to update and release
> new software constantly.  Each new app is placed into a 'new app' view
> that encourages installation of new apps.  It extends their marketing
> beyond keyterm search and apple's ranking/voting system (which has
> problems with popularity bias: apps that are popular get more popular
> because they are popular).
>
> Free software (ideally) has incentives to improve existing software,
> contributing towards existing projects/packages and discourages
> creating trivial clones of existing software.   That is ignoring the
> clones we make of proprietary software.
>

Granted that a lot of what is offered in the Apple app store is
recycled and not very interesting, but it is an ecology that is
encouraging some level of participation. My reason for bringing this
up in this thread is that I think we could be more packaging-friendly
to the newbie or want-to-be developer in terms of growing our
ecosystem. A goal of the XO bundling scheme was to make it easy to
participate. We shouldn't lose sight of that goal if we want to expand
the culture of free software.

-walter
-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org