Thread: Confirmed/CAUTION: N900 Ovi Apps require Corporation + $1M USD Corporate General Liability Insurace
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sharper is offline sharper
2009-11-20 , 13:46
Posts: 189 | Thanked: 121 times | Joined on Oct 2009
#104
Originally Posted by range View Post
Sure. But the first person buying it can then push it into the extras repository.
People pay real money for lots of OSS products for various reasons. I could, for example, take GIMP and make a simply QT UI for it so it runs on the N900, publish the source code but also put a nice productised version up on the Ovi store. Is it unreasonable of me to ask people to pay for that? Am I to be lambasted by the OSS community? Some perhaps who don't understand the relationship between OSS and commercial software.

I'm not saying that I don't want to have a market for developers who want to sell their software, but I hope that some developers see that opening their software might be the better route, as I seriously don't believe that there are many developers making some sort of income from the apple app store at the moment - and same goes for the android store.

I think Apple really buggered up expections of developers with their app store.
"Opening their software" is irrelevant to this discussion. People can do publish fully open sourced applications which still sell for a fee.

Right now "free" is pretty much the only way developers can get their work onto an N900 in a convenient way. That puts it way way behind the other platforms when it comes to attracting talent and innovation. Instead of being able to pay someone to make applications for me according to my requirements I have to make-do with whatever people happen to donate for nothing.