Microsoft prohibits selling open source / free apps on windows store | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft prohibits selling open source / free apps on windows store

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57 pointsphilliphaydon15 comments

Original tweet author here.

Giorgio Sardo, General Manager of Apps, Partners, and Store at Microsoft, has since clarified the company's intent [1][2] and committed to look into clarifying the policy. The currently posted policy (7.16) does not take effect until July 16, 2022.

[1] "We absolutely want to support developers distributing successfully OSS apps. In fact there are already fantastic OSS apps in the Store! The goal of this policy is to protect customers from misleading listings. Thanks for feedback, we will review to make sure the intent is clear" (https://twitter.com/gisardo/status/1544728548241448960)

[2] "That's right, that was the intent. Really appreciate the feedback @WithinRafael @unixterminal @anaisbetts! We are listening, and we will look into clarifying the wording as soon as possible."(https://twitter.com/gisardo/status/1544741955145502724)

I guess someone didn't read the actual TOS change:

"Update to 10.8.7 to prohibit charging fees in the Store for open-source or other software that is generally available for free and restrict irrationally high pricing."

So are they preventing selling of open source software or restricting high pricing?

Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.

It sounds to me like they don't want people repacking open source software into spammy trash apps and charging for them. Like, anybody could take the VLC source code and put a VLC app in the store and sell it for $5.00. This actually did happen in the early days of the Microsoft App store. It was full of trash apps.

What if it's the developers themselves who put their app on the store and charge a small fee for it, like krita?

https://twitter.com/gisardo/status/1544741955145502724

Thanks for this link. Yeah my thinking was some OSS devs might want to make their app open source but sell it on the stores to help fund their efforts. So a blanket ban on selling OSS sounds wrong.

But hopefully the policy gets sorted to rid bad actors and allow people to find their efforts.

This, assuming it applies to the open source dev teams as well, just makes the windows store less worth using. The option to buy a convenient copy of krita from the store while also supporting the devs was amazing.

So, now it's just a way to download the app? I'll just do as I've always done and install it the normal way.

Geany is still $3.29 on the microsoft store

https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/geany-code-editor/9P...

From a followup tweet, it seems they just want to stop misleading listings. I don't think the Geany listing is misleading.

Rafael Rivera @WithinRafael

> Update: 10.8.7 will be edited (no timeline) to reflect Microsoft's intentions to block misleading non-free open source listings (e.g. 7-Zip clones) and not flat out block the sale of open source software in the Microsoft Store.

I wonder why they don't just take down the junk apps for violating trademarks and copyright licenses and add mechanisms to prevent those junk apps from reappearing, like blocking all "Inkscape" apps except the one from account of the trademark holder.

Another concern mentioned in the threads was having a different price between the app store and other ways to get the app, to fix that they should have simply required developers to refer to those other ways from the app store itself, or allowed developers to set an app as pay-what-you-want plus the Microsoft cut, or both.

I hope Microsoft gets rid of the multiple LibreOffice clones from the Store as well.

What if you fork LibreOffice and implement something that people are asking for that the upstream project doesn't. Are you still a misleading listing if you try to sell that through the store?

If you rebrand it to make it obvious this isn't a copycat listing of LibreOffice, IMO that would be okay.

Given that all the LibreOffice clones on the Microsoft Store use their own brand name, they then will be allowed to stay.

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