Free is too expensive (Economist) [LWN.net]

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 11:16 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by jcm
Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)

No, they (rightly) expect that if you install a software application today, it's going to work in 6 months, or 3 years from now. Maybe not in 10 years, but in 10 minutes from now it had better still work.

It is not like this is not possible it just not promoted good enough ... something like glick2 Let me quote from the site:

Easy to install apps
Apps keep working if the OS packages are upgraded, no sudden breaks due to some library change.
In fact, you can run the same bundle on older or newer OSes, meaning you can keep running an older OS and then cherry pick new versions of apps without having to upgrade the while OS to get the new dependencies.
You can install multiple versions of the same application
Bundling leads to an increased level of cross distribution compatibility. Although, you're not bundling your own xserver and kernel, so at some point there is a dependency on system installed things.

Seems to address most of your issues ... just no one uses it (yet?).

(Log in to post comments)

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 16:30 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Seems to address most of your issues ... just no one uses it (yet?).

This immediately raises the question of: why. Who's behind this project? Why haven't they offered some new goodies in glick2 format (a lot of people would like to run latest versions of GIMP or LibreOffice on three-year old distribution using something like glick2) ?

The whole story looks promising, but it's in “too early to tell” stage. But thanks for the hint: the promises are intriguing.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Mar 31, 2012 17:03 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There were several similar systems (autopackage, various bundle implementations) but they've failed because they all need a critical mass of users to succeed.

Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 1, 2012 19:46 UTC (Sun) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]

They _failed_ because their continued use went and hosed a bunch of systems of poor newbies who bought all the "you just have to double click" schtick and perhaps thought autopackage & friends were anything more than a fancy "do anything you like to my system" shell script.

And then their distributions support communities were unable to really help them because they'd been running "installers" that ran slipshod over the whole system.