1.5 - gnome-packagekit?

[Walter Bender]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

I think the idea is something more along the lines of a gallery of
projects. See http://squeakland.org/showcase/ and
http://scratch.mit.edu/.

-walter

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