Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Mon Nov 4 17:39:54 UTC 2013


Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> You assume that sandboxed apps means we get all the negatives and none of
> the benefits.  That is unwarranted.  We can adopt the good parts and
> improve upon it based on the lessons learned from adoption of app stores
> across multiple operating systems and mobile devices that serve a much
> broader audience.  We should be willing to let competent contributors who
> are interested in doing that try it and provide useful feedback when
> necessary instead of dismissing it on bad assumptions as a knee jerk
> reaction on our experiences with proprietary software or bad conduct of
> particular companies.

The reason we are so strongly opposed to app stores is that we are fairly 
convinced that the mere fact of having them available WILL:
* reduce the number of applications actually available in our repositories
  (because some upstreams will just upload a bundle and tell you to use
  that, and nobody will want to do the work of actually getting the package
  through Fedora review),
* result in more applications adopting non-Free licenses (because one of the
  big pressure factors to adopt an acceptable license has always been to get
  into Fedora and Debian repositories – drop that and people will just use
  whatever restrictive license terms they can come up with),
* increase the number of applications that cost money (especially if you
  offer a true app store, i.e. one which allows selling apps in them – do
  you really expect that if you tell people that they can sell apps in your
  store, they will not do it?)
and thus, it is just not true that having the app store available does not 
affect those of us who opt against using it. It WILL have detrimental 
effects that will hurt all users.

        Kevin Kofler



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