1.5 - gnome-packagekit?

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Maybe a next step would be to put more ergs behind the effort to let
> children post their work (including software revisions) on ASLO. (If
> every Memorize game created by every Sugar User were available for
> download, we'd eclipse Apple in a week. But more important, we'd get a
> generation of children sharing their best ideas.)

How would that be vetted or would any bit of crap code be accepted?
Maybe we should look at something like what Maemo and Moblin are doing
and have garage.sugarlabs.org to allow some differentiation between
actively developed and supported apps and the rest. I very much doubt
9 year old would want to support a memorize game and deal with trac
tickets for bugs etc.

Peter