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Red Hat Exchange Is Dead
darthcamaro writes "In 2007, Red Hat launched the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) — an appstore, if you will, of open source partner applications sold from a Red Hat website. Sounds like a good idea, right? While an appstore works well for Apple, turns out that an appstore for open source (from a Linux vendor) isn't such a good idea. 'When we came out with RHX we were hoping for more ambitious adoption but we've learned that selling third-party applications via a marketplace is challenging,' Mike Evans, Red Hat's vice president of corporate development said. 'When you've got marketplaces that offer buyers the choice of buying in the marketplace or directly from the vendor themselves, which is what our marketplace was, there isn't a real efficient marketplace.'"
The Debian repositories are an app store, and I don't see FOSS people avoiding those.
Exactly. That's why I refuse to use a phone for anything but making calls
In any case, one can't count on your contact having a phone (or telco plan) capable of doing anything more than calls or SMS. Lots of people have basic phones, but possibly even more have comparatively "smart" devices that are (a) connected to a plan that doesn't offer more than a typically flaky GPRS conection or (b) connected to an owner that doesn't know what to to with anything other than a phone call.
What is this difference? Most repositories have a filtering process (otherwise any malware author could get something in there, removing its security advantage). The only one I see is the presence of money, but an app store is still called an app store even if it offers free stuff.