Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 06:39:54PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> 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),

If they're easily available to our users, and work just as nicely or better,
why is this a problem? In fact, it kind of sounds like "everyone wins!" to
me.

> * 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),

The world has changed here. Whatever power we had to apply this kind of
pressure is shrinking. In the world of "fork us on github!", "getting into a
distro" really isn't that important to people anymore regardless of what we
do.

In the bigger picture good news, though, free software and open source are
going on just fine in the world whether or not we are relevant.

That said, there's no inherent connection here. We certainly _could_ decide
to only have an app store which only allowed software with FLOSS licenses.


> * 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?)

I'm not sure this is a) true or b) necessarily bad even if true.

But, it's also irrelevant, because I also don't think we're planning to do
anything around collecting money (despite the use of the word "store").


-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>