Agreed. Considering that Maemo is being groomed for mass-appeal, it may attract software companies that fill gaps that OS hasn't.

In an interesting twist, the software companies may start considering cross-platform libraries like QT more seriously when building their apps as they have more exposure to them. It could be a significant boon to linux in general. Instead of having polarity between all-closed and all-open, you have a system that marries the two and lets the users/market decided what it wants.

In addition, the added popularity may attract more 'hackers' to the system. This seems to be the case with the iPhone even considering how closed it is. I suspect many developers would have field-day with an open, pocketable linux computer.

<offtopic>
By the way, I tried browsing the web on the N810. ZOMG. Amazing. Easily better than the iPhone -- no competition IMO. It really is the 'full web in your pocket'. If I didn't feel that the N900 was around the corner, I would totally buy an N810 tomorrow.
</offtopic>


In the end, I believe it adds choice, which could be a potentially great thing. It doesn't mean in any way that OSS has to be stifled.

There's beauty in the grey.


}:^)~
YARR!

ZOMG Corrupt

I'm a huge proponent of Open Source as well so I can really appreciate your sentiment.

I'm thinking about the app store in a bit of a round-about way. I see an app-store increasing the popularity of the device and, as stated in a previous post, creating a truly competitive marketplace that would spawn innovation in both open and closed source software.

Competition is good, no?


}:^)~
YARR!

capt = (void *)corrupt

What I like about my N800 compared to things like the iPhone is that I can just download and install great 3party software, I don't have to go to some store and pay to download, not to mention the story about the Apple "approval".

"Download center" good, "Store" bad.
If I can do apt-get source and rebuild the applications myself, so much for the better.

I tried to suggest a middleway: offer a donation button on the maemo/download section.

https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:donation_on_download_page

But not much response up to now.

Yesterday I read about sim city for iphone. This would even be a reason for me to buy an ipod touch:-) I never played it, as I hate to sit in front of my desktop and playing, but on a N800 or an ipod touch ... They charge about 10$ ...

I myself think about programming some little mind training games. As a mathematics teacher we play some nice games in the class room. Actually I was searching a way to programm for N800 and iphone (from one source code) when I found this discussion here.

So I realy think about going to town, buying an ipod touch and sim city and start programming for ipod touch with my mind training games ...

The thing with an app store is that as GA said, linux users aren't the typical market for buying software as usually everything is free and open source no? Iphone, blackberry, windows mobile they are all targeted towards a huge consumer base and market with a lot of money that is willing to be spent (for example, businessmen who don't care about spending $40 for spb mobile suite to make their windows mobile phone more productive) whereas the internettablets and maemo itself is not incredibly popular (you mention iphone to a random person, they know what you're talking about, you say nokia n800 and they stare at you like you're an alien from a distant planet). Even if you had an app store hoping the monetary incentive would attract people, the incentive isn't very strong with a market far smaller than an iphone or blackberry. Developers would be far more inclined to spend their time developing an app for the iphone/wm/blackberry/symbian because they would make more money. I think in the case for maemo, it would be better to stick with people in the community developing for incentives other than monetary. GA's idea of improving app manager i think is a great solution, but looks tedious. it might be easier to just start over with all the repositories. right now if i click "view applications availble to download" i get a huge list and i dont' know what each node means

edit: oh and i forgot to mention android. although opensource, it's marketing (through google and tmobile) is vastly superior to that of nokia's for the internettablet (as it's thunder was stolen by the itouch :P ) and the fact that many phones in the future are probably going to have android as the os, there would be of course a higher financial gain for them as it's users are just normal cellphone consumers as opposed to maemo with only the internettablets using the os, (and even then people always porting other OSes like android and garnet VM :P) maemo appstore imho financial motivation would not be a great incentive.