Novell Ponders "Open-Source Apps Store"

Barence writes "Novell plans to bring the wealth of open-source software to everyday users through an 'open-source apps store.' 'I would compare what's happening on netbooks with what's happening to the smartphone,' Holger Dyroff, vice president of business development at Novell told PC Pro. 'There's a core experience, but then the ability to customise that experience. On the user end, all they'll see is an open-source applications store with one-click downloads of new software. Unlike the other stores though, they won't have to pay for any of those applications, which will be very attractive.'"

Comments

So, in other words

[killmenow]

Kind of like a repository?

Re:So, in other words

[Hyppy]

yum install aptitude.

Yeah, that's basically all I can see this being. Perhaps it will have a nice web portal with reviews, in-depth descriptions, and decent screenshots?

Re:So, in other words

[Tubal-Cain]

Friendlier. Like Debian/Ubuntu's gnome-app-install.

Re:So, in other words

[jonbryce]

Or like Linspire's Click & Run

Re:So, in other words

[nurb432]

or pkg_add -r for us BSD folks :)

But, all joking aside, you cant discount making it easy for the common guy with a simple GUI, non technical descriptions, screen shots, etc etc.

PCBSD's PBI pages are a good example of how things could work

Re:So, in other words

[mwvdlee]

No.

It's more like something a typical linux newbee would be able to use.

Re:So, in other words

[WinterSolstice]

Yes - I think all of us thought of Synaptic, the Ports collection, etc.

Why is Novell building yet another stupid frontend for yum/apt-get/etc?
Does the world need this?

On a similar vein - does the linux community really need this? I mean, end-users using linux is nice and all (if that's what they want), but I just find that the more "user-friendly" they make these desktop distros, the harder it is to fix them when they break.

Take Ubuntu for example - when it works, that's cool. When something breaks, it breaks ugly and you very quickly destroy the illusion of user-friendliness. Suspend/hibernate, for example. Works great for lots of folks, but when it doesn't... you're building custom hibernate scripts, installing kernel mods like Tux on Ice, etc.

I just think that this is not a smart move from Novell's part. It will give the appearance of yet another bullet-proof polished tool that will clutter up the menu while giving the appearance of user-friendliness without the actual user-friendliness.

Re:So, in other words

[pete.com]

I think you meant suppository

Re:So, in other words

[wastedlife]

Take Ubuntu for example - when it works, that's cool. When something breaks, it breaks ugly and you very quickly destroy the illusion of user-friendliness. Suspend/hibernate, for example. Works great for lots of folks, but when it doesn't... you're building custom hibernate scripts, installing kernel mods like Tux on Ice, etc.

That isn't a very good example. When suspend/hibernate does not work in windows, you are pretty much fucked or you need to dig around for a driver that might fix the problem. Is there a user-friendly way to fix that? Or what about when the MSI installer fails and breaks a bunch of things and leaves a bunch of bad registry entries and files, is there a user-friendly way to fix that?

As much as any one vendor will try to make things user-friendly, eventually something will go wrong and someone will need to get their hands dirty.

Re:So, in other words

[dov_0]

You'd think that someone would work their synaptic brain patterns and come up with that!

Screenshots have been available in synaptic on ubuntu for a couple of releases now

Apt

[Hatta]

How does this differ from any of the GUI front ends available for Debian's apt?

Re:Apt

[revlayle]

not all open source apps are on a Linux platform

Re:Apt

[kj_kabaje]

making FOSS more consumer friendly is not a bad thing. giving people freedom of choice the can understand versus paying for limited choice seems to be pretty good. who cares if it's just a web-based on downloadable interface for apt?

Re:Apt

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, there are a bunch of features mobile app stores have that repositories do not. For instance, the ability to post comments, or to rate programs.

The biggest difference though is in philosophy. Even if you assume a completely authoritarian app store like the iPhones, the apps you download from it are basically what the developers created. You are getting it "as the creator intended". And if you are comparing against Android rather than the iPhone, then the app store is very open, you can upload almost whatever you want within some basic limitations, like, you can't upload an app that violates some other services terms-of-service. Also, an app store is always fresh, because the latency from developers finishing QA on their binary and it being available to download is seconds, at least for Android.

In contrast, Linux distro repositories have a different philosophy:

• They reserve the right not only to reject your software for any reason, but also to modify it via patches as well. The user is not informed that any patching has taken place. Sometimes this patching improves the software, but sometimes it totally breaks it. There are many examples of this (eg openssl).

  This silent tampering is extensive and distributors are loathe to give it up. When Mozilla decided they didn't want the Firefox brand tarnished by extensive Debian patches, Debian decided they'd rather rename the product "Iceweasel" than give up this control.

• Distros are not fresh. Typically the software that was around at the time of release is frozen and updates from upstream are not made available, unless they are security updates. Even then some distros prefer to "backport" security fixes, rather than simply follow upstream versioning. This results in a steady stream of useless bug reports to upstream for problems that were long since fixed. Once again, the developers are not in control of their own software.

If Novell are actually interested in the app store approach, they're going to have to convince the suse developers to give up that level of control and make automated import of upstream binaries the norm. No more "packagers" for applications - that role will have to be obsoleted. And then they'll have to convince upstream developers to actually submit those binaries.

I am doubtful that this will happen. Some years ago I promoted a more normal approach to app distribution on Linux (not an app store, but true web-based distribution). I was flatly told by several distribution employees that they weren't interested in losing control of the total software experience like that, and there would be no change in policy whilst they were around. So I gave up. These days I focus on Android - it's actually got a sane design and software distribution mechanism. Many of the things I wanted to see in Linux are in Android. Novell should be looking at how they can get in on that ..... unless they still think Linux is a viable mass-market desktop?

Re:Apt

[Tubal-Cain]

Wow. That hadn't occured to me. Novel makes an app store for Windwows (and Mac), exposing the users to one of the best features of Linux and BSD (with more apps available than Google Updater). Get all these users hooked on the convenience of having a single auto-update program instead of several, and then let them know that all of these apps they have adapted to are availiable on another, operating system that doesn't cost any money. They won't need to pay for Windows ME 3.0, when it comes out.

Re:Apt

[Nursie]

What is seen as control to you is seen by debian users like me as a guarantee that the system is going to work.

There is nothing at all stopping you from putting software on from other sources. You can add apt sources, you can dump binaries on, you can buidl from source, do what the hell you like.

But the official distro repositories exist to provide distro-approved, working, stable software. Feel free to start your own repo if that's not good enough.

Debian has more available packages than any other system in existance, if I want something else I go elsewhere and change my expectations of stability accordingly. I'd say the system works absolutely perfectly.

And you actually *want* to have to go hunting all over the web for badly written, unstable and incompatible software?

No thanks.

Re:Apt

[Delkster]

Also, building a user-friendly store/repository isn't just a technical task. The distinction between a traditional repository and an app store may seem to be a matter of naming, but it really should be also a matter of presentation, and that requires some thoughtful effort.

For example, it would help browsing if available applications were divided into helpful categories and perhaps sub-categories. Current repositories do of course have categories, but they aren't very helpful to a non-technical user, or even to a technical one: many categories contain so many packages that it makes no sense to browse through them.

In an app store targeted at a general audience, the categories need to be meaningfully sized and set based on non-technical use cases, not technical needs. Also, descriptions for the applications need to be thought about. gnome-app-install used e.g. by Ubuntu is nicer for the average person than browsing through the entire repository (no libraries etc. that most people wouldn't want to install directly anyway), but the package descriptions could really use some work.

Example: Person receives a 7z archive and gets a tip that 7zip can be used to open it. Person finds "7zip" in add/remove applications. And what does the description for that have to say? (from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)

7z and 7za file archivers with high compression ratio

p7zip is the Unix port of 7-Zip, a file archiver that archives with very high compression ratios.

p7zip-full provides:

• /usr/bin/7za a standalone version of the 7-zip tool that handles 7z archives (implementation of the LZMA compression algorithm) and some other formats.
• /usr/bin/7z not only does it handle 7z but also ZIP, Zip64, CAB, RAR, ARJ, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, CPIO, RPM, ISO and DEB archives. 7z compression is 30-50% better than ZIP compression.

p7zip provides 7zr, a light version of 7za, and p7zip a gzip like wrapper around 7zr.

So, uhm, yeah. That's useful information if you already know that both tools listed above are command line tools and that certain archiving GUIs can also use them if they're installed. Other than that, the person in our examle is left totally in the dark. Is this the application he wants for opening the archive? If it is, how on earth should it be used? (Probably just by double-clicking on the archive, because now the same GUI the person had previously used for zip archives can also open 7z, thanks to the installation of the command-line tool, but that's in no way obvious unless you already knew it.) Perhaps the description in an app store should just say "installing this application will allow you to open and create 7z archives with $standard_archiver_gui." In a repository more likely used by more experienced and technically-minded people it would be a useful detail to mention the command-line utilities.

That's certainly just an anecdote, but there are similar and milder cases spread all over, both in gnome-app-install and particularly in more traditional repositories. Good descriptions are also important for searchability.

Anything calling itself an app store should focus more on usability to the average person rather than to the geek who knows and cares what the difference between a Qt and GTK application is. That's another difference between a traditional repository and the kind of an app store the Novell guy is talking about. Yes, it's partially marketing, but it's also a matter of real usability for many people.

Other details such as meaningful sorting for search results come to mind. Also, in an app store you'd probably want to pre-select the applications at least to some degree rather than dumping all open source software the world has produced into the same view. (Huge repositories such as Debian's certainly have their place, and I love having one at my disposal, but most people really aren't going to need a gazillion different applications written for different UI toolkits when there's a perfectly decent one for the one that comes

Re:Apt

[jcupitt65]

I think you're missing the key point of a repository: it's a (large) set of software packages that are tested to work together. If you let devs update their packages willy-nilly, you're going to get horrible breakage very quickly.

Apple's app-store works because there are almost never (as far as I know) dependencies between apps. Updating an app might break the user's savefiles I guess, but it won't stop another app working. To make an analogy: an app store which devs can update can only ever contain leaves, you can't put any twigs/branches/trunk in there.

I suppose you can imagine an app store built on top of apt. An extra repository which is guaranteed to only contain packages upon which nothing else depends, and which has much looser restrictions on updates.

Re:Apt

[drizek]

It has an apple-ey sounding name...

It usually goes like this:

1. Group A invents something
2. Nobody buys it.
3. Apple does the same thing, but worse, and more expensive.
4. Everyone wants it.
5. Groups B-K try and copy Apple, making something better, uglier and cheaper.
6. Everyone still wants the Apple thing they can't afford.
7. Massive credit card debt and economic crisis.

It would be nice if...

[Anonymous Coward]

They added a feature to donate money to open source projects. Or even allowed projects to sell their own open-source software in the store. Or sell for cost add-ons to the open source software. Yes, open source software could very well be downloaded elsewhere for free, but people might well pay for the convenience of getting it one place.

Re:It would be nice if...

[Qubit]

They added a feature to donate money to open source projects. Or even allowed projects to sell their own open-source software in the store. Or sell for cost add-ons to the open source software. Yes, open source software could very well be downloaded elsewhere for free, but people might well pay for the convenience of getting it one place.

But who does (or should) the money go to?

• The guy who packaged My-Shiny-FOSS-App for the Novell store?
• The guy who put the new GUI front-end on the program?
• The guy who's been maintaining the library underneath it all?
• The guys who wrote the original version of the library when they were hopped up on RedBull one night in College and then subsequently forgot about it and lost their sf.net password so they abandoned the project?
• Cowboy Neal?

Sometimes funding FOSS development is relatively easy -- you've got one program that you use all the time, it's written by a single guy (or group of guys), and they've all agreed to have money go to a single organization that has nonprofit status, making it easy to just cut them a check.

For all the rest of the projects, funding development is not so easy.

Lots of projects say things like "Yeah... take a look at the commit logs and decide who you want to fund. Most developers have an Amazon wishlist or a hardware wishlist." While I understand their situation, it would be a lot easier for me if I could just send money to some organization or person. Otherwise I agonize over who to send what to. That's the simple truth.

Speaking of funding FOSS projects, I'm going to put in a shameless plug for my article Free Software starts in your pocket. I'm kind of "beta testing" it right now, and while it doesn't solve the problem of how to give to FOSS projects that I mentioned above, it does solve the problem of remembering to donate money regularly.

Re:It would be nice if...

[hotchai]

Doc Searls (editor of Linux Journal) is working on such a donation system as part of his "Vendor Relationship Management" or VRM project at the Berkman Center at Harvard. The idea is to be able to make small voluntary donations to the software author, or more generally the creator of any piece of work. The goal is make this easy -- simple click of a button that says "donate $5" and put you in control of how much of your personal information (name, credit card details etc.) you want the recipient to know.

Replying to self

[killmenow]

Or an extension to the standard Synaptic-type front end to repositories where you could just click and run an app. What could you call something where you could just click and run any application you might want, I wonder... Hmmmm...I just can't seem to think of anything to name a click and run type of interface to open source repositories.

Re:Replying to self

[artemis67]

Sourceforge lacks the polish of a true app store. Techies are comfortable with it, but it would be confusing to a mass audience.

Re:Replying to self

[SupplyMission]

Riiiight... how many new Linux users do you think would like to go messing around in SourceForge, getting lost in all the operating systems, CPU architectures and package versions, just to try out the open source version of Bejewelled?

"App store" has come to mean something where people can browse a list of apps, click "install" on the apps they like, and immediately start using the app. I'm sure it's not hard to see why SourceForge does not fit that description.

Re:Replying to self

[Abreu]

Menu -> Add/Remove Software

In Add/Remove Software, go to the search box, look for Gweled, click install

Re:Replying to self

[Gerald]

Sourceforge lacks the polish of a true app store. Techies are comfortable with it, but it would be confusing to a mass audience.

"Comfortable" is a relative term. "Able to wade through all of the dead projects and locate the useful bits" would be more accurate. Same with Freshmeat.

Re:Replying to self

[westlake]

"Comfortable" is a relative term. "Able to wade through all of the dead projects and locate the useful bits" would be more accurate. Same with Freshmeat.

Sourceforge is root canal. Sourceforge is the cast that keeps you on crutches for six weeks - with an itch you cannot scratch.

If Sourceforge were a movie, it would be The Land of the Lost.

why not let authors charge?

[trybywrench]

Why not let authors of the software charge just like the smart phone apps? Sounds like a revenue source for Novell and a revenue source for software writers. There can be a mix of free and not-free software in the "store" just like Apple's.

To answer my own question it sounds like Novell wants to leverage the "app store" hype and just put a front end on apt.

Re:Great Idea, just follow through Solidly.

[jshackles]

I think they are mostly trying to capture the iphone / itunes / android / windows mobile / palm-pre marketplace mentality. Nobody is interested when it's called a "repository" but if you call it an "app store" people will download....

Just new marketing..

[Bert64]

The idea of an "app store" has really been copied from the software repositories which have been used on OSS systems for many years...

An often used argument against Linux, is that users want to go down to and buy boxed software to install... But you can't do that with the iphone, the iphone has a repository where you select software and it gets installed for you, just like linux, and this idea has worked very well. Infact, i would say this method works much better than boxed software from B&M stores...

Users want to get software as easily (and usually cheaply) as possible, and if they were aware of just how much easier Linux makes it would actually prefer this method and consider it a strength of Linux, not a weakness.

So what we really need, is education and advertising to show people that Linux does this too, and that it's actually much better than having to fork over cash for physical media and have to install it yourself.

Terrible idea.

[LWATCDR]

As many people will say it is a just a repository.
They may add reviews and ratings which will be a good thing but they shouldn't limit it to free as in beer software.
There is nothing that says you can not sell FOSS if they feel that they must keep it open source. I would open it up to closed source software as well so you can create a real market for Linux software.
If you have both open and closed source developers you will have MORE software choices. You may have both GIMP and Photoshop Elements. GnuCash and Quicken, and SQLedger and QuickBooks.

I know the many Linux users find the idea of paying for anything to be evil but if you want more Linux users you need to find a way to get more Linux software.
One thing I really like about an app store is that it really seems to drive down the price of software. Look on the iPhone App store and you will find a lot of $1.99 to $5 software. Some of it is pretty good. There is also a lot of free as in beer software. It does offer a way for programmers to make money and offers the end user a large selection of software.
And that is a great way to get more Netbook users happy with Linux and more developers developing for Linux. It could even help FOSS. A lot of professional developers do FOSS on the side. If they can make a living using Linux they will be motivated to do more FOSS projects as well.

Port apt-get to Windows and OS X

[javacowboy]

I just filed a patent for the idea of porting apt-get to Windows and OS X. Now I'll be rich! RICH! :D

BTW, I'm only kidding.

All kidding aside, I think this would be a good idea. This would remove the hassle of finding, installing, and maintaining open source software for Windows and Mac users. As a Mac user that has a lot of open source software installed (Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, Adium, etc), I find that MacPorts is lacking in functionality. I spend too much time maintaining these software installations that could otherwise easily be done with a few clicks. This is something that I miss from my OpenSolaris box, which is my second computer.

1 Click Installer

[think_nix]

I think what they are eventually getting is also implementing openSUSE so called 1 click installer for applications. Although a good idea for newer users I find it to be a PITA. 1 click is like a little repository within itself which then adds repos and missing packages if needed.

With 1 click downloads and 1 click installers I seriously wonder if this "software store" will work with other distributions other then their own openSUSE/SLED. Also on another note what kind of Software with what license models will be put in the store ? I for one, know I dont want 1 click everything with (for e.g. mono, imho novell really likes to push this on people) some screwy licensed software being eventually installed without being asked and or notified about it.

Re:1 Click Installer

[mikesd81]

they offer 1-clicks for other distros too. check out check out the site, then click on the drop down and you'll see you can search for other distros too.

Novell... its alive

[pete.com]

Oh sorry that was just a twitch from the electric shock..... its dead!.

A solution to pay developers of free software

[otakuj462]

I posted a very similar idea to Ubuntu brainstorm a few weeks ago, as a proposed solution to the problem of paying developers of free (libre) software. I feel it's highly relevant to the dialog taking place here about this article, so I've copy-pasted some of it here:

Despite its closed nature, Apple's App Store has proven to be a tremendous success. The App Store model involves a central organization that approves and distributes commercial applications directly to users. The central organization takes a small percentage of the revenue generated on each app sold; the rest of the revenue goes directly in the pocket of the developer. The overall goal is to make it as easy as possible to connect users who want to pay for high-quality free software, to developers who want to produce that software.

It is very easy to imagine Canonical acting as the the central distributor in this model, as it currently performs this role already with software that is free-as-in-beer (much of it is free-as-in-speech as well). Additionally, much of the core technologies required for such an app store to exist are already in place: distribution, packaging and installation is all provided by apt; Synaptic provides a convenient graphical front-end for installation and package management. Perhaps, with small extensions to these existing systems, it would be possible to create an infrastructure to allow for individual payments to application developers.

It is also important to note that while Apple's app store primarily hosts non-free software (free as in beer, and free as in speech), and uses DRM to ensure that users do not make copies of this software, I believe that neither of these features are essential to the success of an Ubuntu App Store. It is possible to imagine individual users swapping .deb's of contribution-based software via filesharing networks, or visiting the authors' websites to compile "contribution-based" software from source and package it by hand; and, according to the terms of the GPL, and most other free software licenses, they would be completely within their rights to do so. However, such methods are much less convenient than simply clicking through a graphical interface, and obtaining your packages directly from Canonical, especially with respect to the demographic of non-technical users that Canonical would like to target. Just so long as value is added to the software in some way, be it by way of convenience or by some other means, then a "contribution-based" repository will be used over other methods of obtaining and installing the software. Additionally, I feel that many Ubuntu users would like to see developers get paid, and thus would be more inclined to use such a service.

In conclusion, while putting a price on software that has otherwise been free-as-in-cost might at first seem a bit unusual, we must consider that providing a convenient, direct mechanism for developers to be paid for their software will help, not harm, the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, the ecosystem of free-as-in-speech software, and the Free Software Movement in general. It will attract more users and more developers to the Ubuntu GNU/Linux platform, especially as such a mechanism does not exist on Microsoft Windows. One need only look to the success of the Apple App Store, and Sun's soon-to-be-launched Java app store, to see that there is a demand for such a distribution model.

If you like this idea, please feel free to vote the it up on Ubuntu Brainstorm. Thanks,

Jake

Re:As a developer i don't find it's so attractive

[mdarksbane]

Agreed. People seem to be missing out on the core part of what makes the app store so successful: it makes it very easy to connect your little indie application to a very large audience.

It was also a very new platform with a large install base - ie, a market where being the first or the best product was more important than being established.

If they have a nice mix of free and paid software on there, I could see it being useful... but still not so much, since not every PC shipping would have it. If there's no significant user base, why bother putting your apps on there instead of just tossing it on download.com?

Love of free software only takes you so far - greed and/or financial survival is a much stronger motivator.

Re:As a developer i don't find it's so attractive

[symbolset]

Of course. The purpose of software is to generate revene for programmers and their employers. The availability of free and convenient sources of good software demotivates the professsional programmer by devaluing his product until he can't get money for it unless it's innovative, more powerful or easier to use.

These "free software" rogue programmers must be stopped! If this were allowed to continue for a couple decades, the jerks might even make whole operating systems and office suites. Average people might work an entire day without using any paid-for software at all. This is anarchy.

I know something you don't know.

[westlake]

In Add/Remove Software, go to the search box, look for Gweled, click install

And if I don't frequent Slashdot, how do I know that Gweled is in the repository, what it does, or how to spell it?