Ubuntu launches appstore | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu launches appstore

developer.ubuntu.com

149 pointsrizumu39 comments

I've been a linux desktop user on and off since Redhat 5.0 and usually take a year break between attempts to give it time to catch up.

Recently I installed Fedora 15 because I love the new Gnome3 desktop and was disappointed to have all little sorts of niggling stupid things on my 4-year old ThinkPad T60... like recovering from sleep and now sound doesn't work or the iwl3945 being buggy.

I tried out ArchLinux and love the distribution, but found that building my own Gnome3 desktop with all the little applets and gadgets Fedora build in (like advanced touchpad controls, etc.) to be a pain in the ass of hunting down exactly the right modules I needed.

I almost gave up, but decided to try out Ubuntu 11.04 after swearing it off when I spent a year with 8->9 and decided Unity looked horrible.

Boy... I was surprised.

It is more polished than anything else out there I tried. Runs well, everything worked out of the box and the first thing I noticed right out of the gate is the Add/Remove software has gone from being a simple UI over Synaptic to being what looks like an app store already.

As soon as I saw that it dawned on me how brilliant canonical was being with taking Linux desktop a step forward by giving a direct sales channel to people wanting to work and sell on Linux.

11.10 and 12.04 behind it are going to be excellent user experiences and with the addition of the app store I think Canonical is making all the right decisions to take Linux on the desktop to the next level.

You factor in tablets and tablet-friendly apps in the next few years and this is a really smart/aggressive move on their part.

Big congrats to that company and team for always pushing beyond the scope of what "Linux is known for" and shoving their way in to realms dominated by other consumer OSs.

It is nice to see the ambitious and gusto.

yes i am using using ubuntu for 5 years now, and have around 30 users following me to use it; and I find it a good step forward for canonical to focus on desktop. Last week I tried, kde4.6, gnome3, xfce and gubuntu and i was impressed by all of them. I am currently using gnome3 and sometimes unity 3D version.

I agree 100%.

I have been used GNU/Linux since Red Hat 4 and I spent years using Fedora and Debian.

I'm not an Ubuntu big fan but I have to say that it's a good distro out of the box. I'm very happy using it on my i3 laptop.

Title should be changed to "Announcing the Ubuntu App Developer site".

Besides editorializing titles usually being frowned upon, this title is incorrect.

Yes, it should be changed, I realized that after the fact.

After the fact that you read the article? or after the fact that you submitted it to YC?

After I submitted I realized I should have kept the title the same. We were discussing it in the office in terms of an appstore, so the title made sense at that moment.

In the past I thought Ubuntu's intention was to level the playing field, allowing beginners from any economic background access to the best free software. I can imagine in three years time that paid Ubuntu applications in certain fields, 3D, graphic design, etc. becoming priced above what users in developing countries can afford, even still these applications could become industry standards. This seems an unfair advantage to the first world countries who can afford to spend +10$ for an app.

In the past I thought Ubuntu's intention was to level the playing field, allowing beginners from any economic background access to the best free software.

This is true. The rest of your argument seems to operate on a wrong definition of what free software is: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

If the right is removed to modify and redistribute (to other distros), because of appstore lock in, then it wouldn't be free. My argument is that only the economically privleged will have access to certain software on an OS that was constructed around the intention to provide equal access to everyone.

The free software isn't going away and never will, and what we developers provide as the core system will always be free. Making it possible or easy for users to also install additional proprietary software doesn't change that.

So you are a dev right? Always wanted to ask this, what are the problems with price discrimination. As in lowering the prices if someone from developing countries is purchasing the product. I mean the tech problems.

The technical problem for price discrimination based on the user's location is that location can be faked. The social problem is that, even if you succeed, users who are paying more will feel ripped off.

I think a better approach is to allow users to pay what they want (maybe with a specified minimum). If it's pitched the right way, some users will happily pay more than you'd charge them, but you're still letting poor (or stingy) users get your software, and (as a side benefit) those users may also recommend your product to others. So the net profit could be greater than if you charged a fixed price.

You could also try selling the Latin-America version (Spanish only) cheaper than the USA-English version.

Funny you ask this, as I'm probably the only Ubuntu dev with an economics degree rather than a computer science one.

Regardless, from a technical perspective, we don't really collect enough data about users to know who would be willing to pay more, and that sort of data is a minimum requirement for price discrimination of any kind. We have some pretty firm policies about not collecting personal data unless we absolutely have to, so I don't expect this to change either.

You could make a few guesses though, and for instance charge different amounts in different currencies or countries. You could also do what traditional retailers do, and provide coupons of various sorts in particular venues. We're not technically ready for anything like that yet though.

Pragmatically, I don't think it's a rabbit hole we'd want to go down even if it were no different than what existing publishers are doing anyway.

I think this could be what it's going to take for Ubuntu to gain non-developer, non-governmental traction on the desktop.

I hate to say it, but the best developer software tends to be open source and the best end-user software tends to be proprietary.

>I hate to say it, but the best developer software tends to be open source

GCC and Clang and Perl and Python and V8 are fantastic and lovely and incredibly important to everyone, but i challenge you to find me any C++ IDE with better code completion and tooling than Visual Studio.

Pretty sure I said "tends to be" and not "is always".

Yes, open source C++ IDEs remains a difficult area... I think Qt Creator is pretty nice, as it groups all kinds of useful tooling together but is very focused on Qt.

The Eclipse C++ support is also pretty good these days. But it was too long ago that I looked at Visual Studio to argue anything about being better or worse...

I would welcome Visual Studio for Ubuntu though :-)

IMO it contradicts their message. From wikipedia: It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu ("humanity towards others")

There is some truth in what you say, but that line of reasoning can quickly go out of hand. I mean, you could also argue that every time they increase their system requirements, they do not act out of humanity towards others.

Also, I can imagine that Canonical is looking out for more and better sources of revenue. A dead Ubuntu is of no use to anyone either.

Nod. They certainly have the right to change direction to sustain, but the purpose of their mission continues to become blurrier.

I think their mission revolves more around Bug #1 in Ubuntu: “Microsoft has a majority market share”.

What about programmers from developing countries? Ubuntu offers everything needed to program you application and a decent living off their presumably western clients. Just a thought.

The minimum price you can charge for your app, if you want to charge for it, is $2.99 ( http://developer.ubuntu.com/publish/ ). I wonder why.

My guess would be related to their merchant account agreement. They probably wouldn't make any money on lower transactions due to fees.

Typically, you're going to pay around 50-60 cents on a small transaction, unless you have a special arrangement with your gateway and/or merchant back (or they're micropayment-friendly). You can help that somewhat by batching, if you expect people to buy multiple items before the authorization expires, but the easiest way is to just increase the price.

Yeah, and unlike the title suggests, they don't call it App Store. App Store may or may not end up being generic, but by avoiding any debate over it you save yourself unnecessary burden on yourself esp. when you are in the business of free software. (Although it then begs the question, do we change our behavior in fear of richer players?)

Awesome. I hope I, as a developer, can make some money with this new service. Lets see ..

Is it just me, or does the Ubuntu app store need:

  nav li { list-style-type: none; }

... using Chrome 14 on OS X

I wonder if this means more DRM is on its way to Ubuntu.

What DRM?

They specifically state that there is no included DRM. However, publishers are free to implement their own DRM, however ineffective it might be.

I highly doubt that. You can't have an open source software with DRM.

Why not? It's the encryption keys that are important, not the encryption method itself.

Because in DRM is security through obscurity. The data/programme/file is encrypted to hide from the user, but must also decrypt it from the user, and the user has full technically and legal rights to that code.

If you have a DRMed music file, and (say) an open source music player can play it, then the file is encrypted and the encyrption key is kept with/in the file. You can just look at the source code of the music player and see it extracts the key from the file (or from your master key file), and see how it decrypts the file. You can then decrypt the file yourself. ergo drm breaking.

DRM can also force restrictions like "Only allow person with account id X from opening this programme", that could be implemented in the code as a function that says "doesUserHavePermission()". If the code is open source, then you just change that function to always return true, and to always allow everyone to use it. (Since it's an open source programme, you can then distribute your code with your 'fix' applied)

You can just look at the source code of the music player and see it extracts the key from the file

To be fair, we can also do that without source code. It only (yet again) proves DRM is pointless against technical people that are determined to break it.

Non-technical people or people that do want to play "by the rules" won't do that. Also, the vendor could do things such as embed the name of the buyer inside the downloaded executable/data, to discourage sharing...

To be fair, we can also do that without source code

You can, but it's not the same.

With an open source programme:

* it's much easier to find & disable the DRM checks

* I can (legally) distribute a version with DRM disabled

* I can legally distribute a (probably small) patch that disabled the DRM, it's much easier for someone else to verify that my patch disabled the DRM, and doesn't have a trojan than if I give a binary diff.

* With open source programmes, I could submit my patched version (that disables the DRM) to a very freedom loving distro (like debian), and campaign for it's acceptance into the package index (making all Debian users not have DRM, etc.)

These things are technically possible with propriaty software, but you don't have the advantages above.

Isn't it just a portal to allow devs easier ways to upload their software than having to run an apt repository or maintain a PPA? I mean, sure they're enabling paid applications, but those have already been around for 6 months now.

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