Sometimes the "free" thinks are better than the "paid" thinks!

Well... Windows does not have any DRM either. Does it mean that there are no good or/and paid apps for Windows?

This is completely disingenuous. The OP is talking about free and non free software on a mobile devices. You and the 6 people that thanked you need to get off their FOSS high horse and start thinking.

On the mobile platform I do believe that good apps take a lot of work to release. Lots of devs have the initial idea and motivation but then loose interest at the uat/deployment stage and fail to polish the apps - profit motive bridges this gap.

Until the mobile sphere develops much further, and we have polished applications like the equivalents of GIMP, Firefox, Apache, MySQL, etc floating around it's a pay software world out there.

Anyway, disagree with me if you like, but look at the facts. Comparing the App Store (heavily locked down), Andriod Store (pretty heavily locked down) and the Ovi Store (very few restrictions) and examine what's in them.

Doh... There is a BIG difference for publishers between App Store and Ovi Store.
You don't need to be business for publishing to App Store and you need to be business (VAT number requirement) for publishing to Ovi Store.

Show me those hobbyist programmers that are eager to register a company just to post his 1 euro app to Ovi.

I wish that every single person here has understanding of how commercial world motivates devs and that every OS lover needs to pay his bills as well.

With this in mind they should hit donate button first then thanks. I'm pretty sure you could see better results and more polished apps. But is hard to demand this behaviour from people that see only one side of medal.

Edit: Hey guys! What about put (1 Euro) behind Thanks button here?

Oh yeah sorry, the minimal fee to register a company and become sales tax registered (£25 or so in the UK + a few forms) is such a put off. This is certainly the reason why the App Store and Ovi Store are like they are.

honestly, before buying n900, i considered open source and good hardware
sure, keep em both
but ppl like getting paid for their hardwork
no drm means others use their apps for free..
this point of this thread was,
is no drm a good thing or bad?
and money is a motive..
this isnt about free apps
this is about the variety of apps
am i talking to myself here?

wikiwide messaged me,
his words were "3. And in mixed world of free and non-free apps the developers who make free apps don't have to trouble themselves about courts, piracy, etc - and can occasionally get some contributions and thanks for free app. While developers of non-free apps have to think about consumers, competitors, advertisement, DRM, etc - and they occasionally get some pirates and loathing from consumers. "

i prefer piracy then lack of variety..

So.. is my English so bad? Or I'm talking to myself either.

But you can run GIMP and Iceweasel on the n900 if you want to take a little bit of interest/effort to do so. We still have not been told what applications you are missing. The n900 has one application no mobile has - a full LXDE install of Debian. With that you can do so much more than any mobile phone - you could manage a corporate network if you needed to, from a device in the palm of your hand.

But, if you want to pretend it's a Nintendo or Playstation thingy. Nah.

I did post-grad business studies, as well a masters in IT, and the only good things I have seen come out of the industry are free. The rest tie you up so you can hardly use the things you already paid for, and then you have to keep paying to use what you have already. DRM? That is a brick wall you end up throwing your device at to try and get it to work with things you already paid for, but it won't unless you pay more to use them. Unfortunately, instead of boycotting this crap, people fall for it and it becomes a fact of life.and ending up with some Jobs-worth telling me what I can and can't do with what I have bought. Hell, you don't even get a copy of windows with a PC any more - it is on a partition on the HDD, and you have make your own recovery disks, and if that fails to restore after a crash you have to pay to get your system back. What you get is permission to use a piece of software.

Open means 'you can use this any way you want to' and 'you can send some money if you want to support this' and 'you can even improve this if you like'. Problem is, we do tend to think it is free. It isn't, but we enjoy making use of other people's work without paying for it, so haven't paid for it yet.

The worst thing that happened with linux-derivatives like OS-X and mobiles is the way distributors take the work and corrupt it by locking it all down again. That is because they are not interested in the product, or the software, or the customers - only the money they can derive from these.

I have found there are mainly two things I need to use non-free software for. One is MS.Word, because Endnote is the de-facto referencing package, and it doesn't ship for linux. The other is Adobe Elements, which although I prefer Gimp, can support higher bits and allows me to use astronomical plugins (also, most of the commercial astronomy programs only ship for Windows/Mac, and cost a fortune). Stuff like CS4 is seriously overpriced. It is quite refreshing that Orrorery runs on the n900, and if that isn't good enough, you can just about run Stellarium for Debian (albeit tiny and slow - it is a hungry application that comes with its own database).

Rant-off.

Mish