for almost a year on having 2 s60v5 devices and a 6 months owning a maemo, i have not thought of this.....

Maybe we are mixing two facts that maybe cant be mixed.

1) The money, the motivation and the apps
2) The DRM

PalmOS, GarnetOS and the pda's world several years ago had more than 19k apps (wikipedia source), for LOT of them you need to pay and each one take care for their own locking methodology, usually a serial key based one

that was the DRM of 2000, we all make money with this system, and we all were happy.

but Today, its like if we can't get a complex encrypted os-based drm system that can wipe your personal data if someone who we dont know wants, then we cant do business.

The reason for this is to make the handset manufacturer money.

Under the 2000-Palm model you describe, Palm were making little to no money from 3rd party apps - and didn't realise they could. I guess for bigger software vendors you could have licensing arrangements, but I think the prevailing thoughts at the time were that this approach didn't work. Remember it comes off the back of a period when things like Amiga, Acorn, Apple were all dying and the IBM PC/Windows open approach to third party applications was seen as the way to go.

Once a platform has superiority then you reign in the 3rd parties to get a cut of their profits. Apple's just been clever enough to lock it down from day 1, and sell a great device that is well marketed and cornered the market, where apps 'support' platform (and vice versa) in homogeneity.

We can separate two concepts again

1) The application distribution strategy, the technical concerns (OTA, usb), exposition to customers (ecommerce), and we can even put here the way that everyone makes money. For application developers, is all that you need. we cant put apple here, because apple dont make the apps. As a whole, this is called Business Model.

2) DRM, remote wipe, os lock, vendor lock, that makes real customers potential criminals from day 1.

We can have #1 without #2, because #1 and #2 are two different ways to make money, and two different companies get the money.

If I may add, in the Palm/WinMo era, there were already 3rd party 'app stores' that handled many functions that current appstores do:
- files hosting
- users registration
- billing system
- drm (serial #) upkeep.

Some of the differences that worked against their mass adoption by the customers:
- Not (technically, legally, financially) coupled with the platform
- Charged 50-70%(!!!) of the revenue (Current market is 30%)

I'd also like to add that all DRM adds is 'control' to the owner.
What they do with that control can be good:
- Keep out malicious codes
- Safekeep the information of all the licenses a user owns (paid or free)
- Make sure the developers that wants to get paid, gets paid
- etc

or evil:
- Keep out competitive codes
- Misuse the user's personal information
- Strong arming financial tactics
- etc

It's not automatically evil. But they're human.

= 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.

I feel exactly the same, nokia is not focusing on one thing to make it better and they sure don't want their devices to be the best in the world because they are moving from one device to another and leave that device alone, hopefully we have this community for N900 so they can't harm the N900 but still they are leaving N900 behind and moving to another project (which they do the same to it)

Very true.. but something even truer is the self satisfaction and inner rewards does not feed you (and the family) nor does it pay the constant bills.

This becomes an ethical debate of money. As much as most of the advocates in this forum is use to the idea of free Linux and ideals of Freeware/GPL, it really does not work in the real world of commercialism (which funnily enough, is what our society is based upon). In fact, what did we use to buy our N900's in the first place? or the constant phone bills that is associate with it?

Quite wrong. Microsoft has DRM on Windows Media, Play Ready, and a method to sign/authenticate drivers, WHQL which now supports HDMI and Blu-Ray output to validated media displays, among other DRM methods, SDK's and options within that platform.

Windows is perhaps the worst example to bring up in a DRM conversation. It's downright saddled with them.