= Stupid assertion. Many good apps on the n900 exist - I suggest actually using your app manager and trying them out. There is a lack of commercial interest in apps because: 1) a few months ago there was huge uncertainty about the future of maemo 2) Nokia were very, very quiet almost embarrassed to talk about maemo and n900 3) when Nokia did say something one particlular director said no free mapping software for maemo5 and n900 maybe next version of maemo 4) OVI store is an utter, utter fail 5) maemo5 has reached maturity and stability with PR1.2 update but Nokia thought "awwww f*** it!", moved away from maemo5 and decided to start all over again with meego 6) Nokia don't get this "app store" business and unfortunately lost any chance of being a serious competitor with iPhone and Android . (That genuinely is a shame). 7) Nokia are so busy planning and formulating stratagies then life is passing them right by 8) All theses points mean that Nokia is unable to compete with high-end smartphones and have hit their ceiling 9) Nothing will change until some serious management and director changes take place within Nokia.
There are several cases where giving app away "for free" makes sense. Some bullet points follow. * You want to advertise yourself. Being able to point out at a job interview, "oh and I made this app for N900, just for the fun of it, it has about 100k downloads" is going to contribute on the positive side. * Selling is a lot of work. Not all of us like to sell things, and when you do, your product must be excellent or you get a lot of complaints. Sometimes just giving away is easier, especially when expected sales number is not high. Skipping the selling part let's the developer focus on where he excels. * Making a copy costs nothing. There might be a piece of software you wrote for yourself. But why not let anyone else to use it too, it's not like you lose something with that. * Encouraging others to give their software away for free, too. This is my personal favourite. Imagine that your good free software inspires 10 other people to also share their work (or keep working on something they already give for free). You have just got 10 people to work for your good. * Cooperation gets the best total score in the Prisoner's Dilemma. * Raising the bar for non-free apps. Sometimes you find out you have paid for a piece of crap, and know you could do better. Implementing and giving away a proper implementation forces the for-profit guys to actually work for their profit. * You just get your kicks from doing something good, and seeing other people enjoying it. * Other. I'll use myself as an example. I wrote a piece of software called battery-eye. You can get it for free. When I got my N900 and stumbled on these forums, a lot of people seemed to have battery problems due to various software bugs. Worse, there seemed no way for people to communicate the problem accurately. The point of my app is to give the average user a way to see that something is wrong, so (s)he can complain, and hopefully force Nokia and other developers to fix obvious battery drains out of their software. Being an N900 owner, this is a direct benefit for me. The above points really are just various realisations of that there's more to life than your bank account balance. Not every thing you do in your life directly translates to money, but it can still bring you personal benefit.