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Free is too expensive (Economist)Free is too expensive (Economist)Posted Apr 1, 2012 9:57 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Free is too expensive (Economist) by wertigon Parent article: Free is too expensive (Economist)
1. App store receives the source code from the developer. And this is where the story ends. It's easy to convince junk producers to give you their code. It's very hard to do the same with well-known (and thus desirable) programs. They perceive their code as one of the most precious things and emphatically don't want to send it anywhere. Do you know that Google does not have access to the Flash plugin sources, for example¹? Even if it has explicit agreement with Adobe and ships it with Chrome. Stallman may dislike it as much as he wants but proprietary software will not go away any time soon. Either your accept and accommodate the fact or you are destined for the obscurity. There are nothing wrong with serving niche needs (gNewSense is fine distro for some people), but if we are talking about mainstream then this approach will not fly. ──────────
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Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 12:41 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
But the thing is, in this model you don't give away your code to the general public, you merely give the code to a maintainer that is specialized in porting software. It's no different than hiring a consultant to scrutinize security bugs in your code, except instead of looking at it they package it.
Such a model would fix most problems, but someone need to put up an app store and make it work with various distros.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 1, 2012 16:44 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] But the thing is, in this model you don't give away your code to the general public, you merely give the code to a maintainer that is specialized in porting software. So what? You still send your “crown jewels” to some tiny company which probably does not have enough money in the bank to properly reimburse you in a case of the leak. Note that typically companies don't even have the source rights for all the components (witness mighty struggles when they want to open-source something) so even if you'll manage to placate internal legal dogs it's still will be mighty struggle to obtain sources for all the middleware used. Huge undertaking. And for what? For 1% of users? May be 2% if we are lucky? Are you joking? Such a model would fix most problems, but someone need to put up an app store and make it work with various distros. Sorry, but no. Such model may help with open sources packages (and thus it's probably worthwhile) and will include much derided “glorified bookmarks”, but most serious developers will just ignore it.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:15 UTC (Mon) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant. It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely. So yes, I obviously believe this model has a future, and it's a better one than staticly compiling everything always...
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 9:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] But the thing is, it's still no different than hiring a consultant. Consultant usually is given access to small piece of the code at time. Often it agrees to sign extensive and complicated agreements to see even that. And in any case that's for serious issue (security) which warrants serious efforts. 1% of market is just not enough to do something like this. Heck, 5-10% of the market (which MacOS owns) is not enough: companies which are contracted to port stuff to MacOS often receive some things only in binary form (that's why CrossOver for Redistribution is popular way to go in these cases)! IOW: consultant you are hiring plays by your rules and must convince you to do this or that. Access to the whole codebase is rare luxury which consultant rarely gets! Yet here you are starting from that premise… It does not have to be a small company - Canonical, or Novell for instance, would do rather nicely. So what? Google is larger than both of them and it still is not trusted enough without extensive agreement negotiated separately for each piece of software. This process just does not scale.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:28 UTC (Mon) by jedidiah (guest, #20319) [Link]
I don't even think it needs to be source code. It could just be the binaries. Then the "store operator" would be in charge of packaging. Some of the Loki installers have been redone for newer versions of Linux. That kind of approach could be done wholesale.
A universal frontend could be done for the old games by someone like Linux Game Publishing as a proof of concept. They could even throw in some old apps too.
Distribution support would be driven by demand of course.
Free is too expensive (Economist) Posted Apr 2, 2012 18:41 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] This plan will fall apart because distributions remove old versions of libraries willy-nilly. Sure, if you'll first create some stable ABI and will keep the set of libraries for that ABI around then it'll work… and this is what this thread is all about.
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