Nowadays only companies with a VAT number can publish in Ovi. If I recall correctly the 50€ is a one time registration as publisher. Then you can publish as many apps as you wish. In such context the fee isn't an issue.

The combination of Ovi store and free / open source software is worth exploring and has many untested waters.

Worth exploring because Ovi will be marketed to regular consumers that in some cases will be exposed to software freedom in mobile for the first time.

Worth exploring to put in competition side by side community and commercial software, under the same terms and quality standards.

Worth exploring because Ovi comes with a payment framework that can be potentially presented as a donation framework.

But then...

How to deal with the VAT requirement when most community software is developed without anything resembling remotely a Ltd company? Is a company acting as proxy something to be considered?

Since free / open source software can be redistributed by anybody will you be happy if a company is redistributing your software in Ovi without asking you? What if they are asking for a price? Will someone be able to come up with the same app, but for free?

Also, what about dependencies? The store concept works well for cases when you have one package and all the dependencies are satisfied by the official libraries pre-installed in the device and available in the SDK. But what about an 47Kb Python app pulling all the Python dependencies? And pulling from where? The Ovi store doesn't have a setting like Extras nowadays.

I don't foresee big problems in practice, but as you see there are many combinations unexplored. What do you think, is it worth trying something?

Tero and me are looking into this these days. Any input is welcome and now is a good time to discuss. Even to brainstorm.