Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 23:42 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Trademarks and their limits by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Trademarks and their limits

that's what the Open Build Service is for (openbuildservice.org or in action (for free, yes, and supporting 7 architectures and 15+ distro's) on build.opensuse.org)

This is cool, but it does not solve the underlying problem: you still need to build bazillion packages to support tiny portion of [potential] users.

It's not about gatekeeping, it is about money.

Aren't they the same things? Most developers out there are commercial developers. They want to create and sell things. A lot of applications are created for a single buyer - and while it's not clear how well Linux does for these I don't think it's a big deal. But for desktop shrinkwrapped software matters, too. And this is where gatekeepers matter: they may raise investment needed to reach the audience (Linux distributions case) or they can reject your creation out of hand (Apple). When you hit this stage we are talking ROI - and ROI for Linux software is incredibly poor. Both because it's hard to distribute Linux software and because there are so few potential users.

But even when we do (on Ubuntu, for example) it doesn't happen to a great extend.

Why do you say so? Because there are no 500'000 applications? That's wrong measure to take.

Let's not talk about "big boys" (Windows, Android, etc). Let's take a look on small players. You know, webOS (less then 5 million users, 5000 applications), Chrome web store (30 millions users, about 6000 applications), Samsung's Bada (around 4 million users, around 2400 applications).

Ubuntu boasts 12 million users which means that we should expect about 3-5 thousand applications. And there are about 4000 of them, which sounds more-of-less fine. But these are Ubuntu apps, not Linux apps (all the links for RC Mini Racers will send you to the Ubuntu Software Center). Are we Ok with creation of Apple-style directory? If yes, then everything is fine: looks like Canonical knows what it does. If not, then well, we need to think about Linux's desktop future.