The GNOME project at 15 [LWN.net]

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 14, 2012 22:07 UTC (Tue) by walters (subscriber, #7396)
In reply to: The GNOME project at 15 by me@jasonclinton.com
Parent article: The GNOME project at 15

For what it's worth as someone involved in GNOME, I don't see how an *official* GNOME "application store" could work without a sustainable business model for humans to review code in order to ensure we're not shipping malware.

What we can enable though is third parties to distribute applications, whether Free Software or not. Not of course that this hasn't been attempted before...the internet is littered with various ones like Autopackage and such. It's not an easy domain.

However, I think these previous attempts were addressing an actual need, and could be made higher quality if they were integrated into the core of the system rather than an add-on.

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Free software in app stores

Posted Aug 15, 2012 5:55 UTC (Wed) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> For what it's worth as someone involved in GNOME, I don't see how an *official* GNOME "application store" could work without a sustainable business model for humans to review code in order to ensure we're not shipping malware.

No disagreement with that. There's nothing in there which means you can't sell free software apps.

The GNOME project at 15

Posted Aug 15, 2012 12:48 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

These are the same issues that you run into with current package distribution model.

> However, I think these previous attempts were addressing an actual need, and could be made higher quality if they were integrated into the core of the system rather than an add-on.

Unfortunately the 'merging into the system' means that you are likely to run into the same issues with current package management systems.. Namely distributions suffer from seeming irreconcilable differences and tend to create what ends up functioning like fiefdoms for little significant technical advantage over another distro's approach.

In addition to this the regulation and acceptance policies that distributions have set up for their package repositories are a major barrier of entry and bottle neck for that serves as a significant barrier between users and developers.

What is needed is a system that handles applications in a way that is distributed and offers a lot more freedom to users and developers then current practices for package management allows in Linux distributions. Also we need to have something that addresses applications and their dependencies as complete 'application units' rather then individual components. At least from a application developer and user perspective.