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Filtering By License Should Be Possible in App Markets
tonymercmobily writes "With the latest news from Microsoft, which will allow open source apps in their store, we will see more and more an abundance of per-pay applications mixed with license-free ones. What if you can't tell between free and non-free anymore? Even now, a quick search on the Android market is just not telling enough. But what do you do then when Ubuntu has the same problem?"
For Android there's always the F-Droid market that exclusively lists Free Software (it's small, but I've found it pretty useful).
Except in Apples: There's no free as in freedom there.
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You should only use GPL 3 software and OSs. It's about FREEdom.
The story here is what?
If you're using precompiled software what does it matter? Unless you build from source you have no evidence that the source on offer in any way corresponds to the binary you're running anyway.
I guess today is a passable day to die.
When I was temporarily using my fathers android phone, I wanted a way to sort by price. I could, at the time, find no way to do this. This was really annoying because I had to look through tons of search results to find any of the free apps. It doesn't make me want to get my own android device because finding the free stuff to try out is nearly impossible.
I'd settle for keyword search — even it does not work. Searching for "sleepyti.me" (a site which I hoped someone had made an app for) gives endless results:
Also, the search results magically wrap around, so I don't really know which was the first.
For the topic in hand, no there's no license search possibility, only this, what ever this search is.
...but here's what I do:
I use the software that does what I need most effectively. My needs are rarely served by refusing to use a piece of software just because it's not open source. I often find that the open source software is a better value (for my needs, GIMP is a better choice than Photoshop, and it's starting to look like it's also a better choice than Lightroom), but not always.
The simple fact is, most people just don't care what license their software is. You can complain as much as you want that other people are just uneducated, but it doesn't matter.
To address one point directly from the article:
No. We're not approaching that. We're STILL at that. Free, to the vast run of humanity, means "you don't have to pay for it." It means "This doesn't cost anything." To a relatively small number, it may also mean "I have set this product free, and you may do whatever you want with it," but that's not the majority view.
Google knows that. That's why the free label on Android means "no charge." So does Canonical. They've come closer than anyone else to marketing linux in a way that appealed to ordinary consumers. Those ordinary consumers don't really care whether an app or application is open source. They care whether they'll have to pay for it or not. That's not a failing on their part. That's good business sense. It's rarely a worthwhile business technique to annoy your consumers with ideology: it's a much better technique to offer them stuff they don't have to pay for, if they'll just buy this one expensive thing from you.
OK, I'm a software developer and graphic designer. I know all about GPL and Creative Commons and I released plenty of my stuff under open and proprietary licenses as well.
However, when I buy or download an app (in "consumer mode"), I simply don't care about its license. What matters if it works as advertised, if it contains malware and if it's fun (for games). That's it. I couldn't care less if, say, "Smart Tools" is GPL v3 or Apache or proprietary. It does the job. 99.999% people think the same.
If you want to have only open source software on your tablet or phone, pat yourself on the back, you're so special.
Not enough people care about software licenses to warrant adding an option to filter. Just type include GPL in search box and you will find the desired results
The developers who care about software licenses will include the information in the description as a selling point.
This really sounds like a feature request. I want to filter my searches in a way that is not provided and get information in the results that is not provided. I don't know what to say I'm faced with apps everyday that don't have all the features I would like and is weighted down with features I never use. I would have submitted it to the manufacture not /.
There are plenty of people who will pay the .99 cents to not have to compile the source but being able to take the source and compile your own is about as close as we can get to trusted applications.
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If there was enough demand I think you would find 'filter by license' already there. But I don't think it needs to be there cluttering up already limited screen space (on my Android phone) when it is only demanded by a very, very small group of dogmatics.
Personally I don't give a shit if an app is open source or not. If I am installing an application, it is for a purpose. Whether it is open source or not is moot. And I am certain that I am in the majority here. If the app does the job, then I use it, if it doesn't I don't. If an open source app is good enough to use, then it will be used. That is a far better filter than dogma. Having open source apps survive on merit will ultimately make the open source world stronger. And most of the world doesn't care about how the tool is licensed anyway, they too only care if it does the job (and I don't blame them). And you won't change that so give up trying. I think if the open source world focused more on that than the 'only open source is good, use it because it is open' dogma, eventually you might see a real 'Linux on the desktop' breakthrough.
It is understandable that Ubuntu doesn't support this. Their slogan is, 'it just works' or something like that. They support proprietary drivers, etc. because most of the users want their apps to just work. Most Linux users whether on Ubuntu or not probably also download the proprietary drivers if they aren't already installed. Why, because if they are necessary to make their system work the way they want it to, then that is what they will use. If a lot of the open source movement focused on satisfying the user and their needs instead of themselves and Stallman, then more people would use it. I generally support open source but I can't stand a lot of its pigheadedness.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Can you really trust your pre-compiled compiler?
Reflections on Trusting Trust.
The thing I like about Open Source/Free Software, in the end, isn't so much that I have to, myself, inspect and compile every program. I trust the pre-compiled binaries because I know that if someone *does* try to sneak something in, someone else will find it, probably pretty quickly.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, I'm glad there's very technical and very paranoid people out there double checking everything so I don't have to.
FWIW, the most useful list of software I've found recently is Hyper Jeff's OS X (Native) Applications list:
http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/apps.php?w=1
which allows filtering by license type.
That said, there's not much useful new software coming out (I'd love to be proven wrong w/ download links) --- mostly it's just up-dates to stuff I've already d/l'd and installed:
LyX
Scribus
Inkscape
I'd love to find a modern alternative / successor to Zoomracks (I want a freeform database which allows calculations on information w/in it).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Free games with in-app purchases need to be marked as such. I saw that infamous game, Smurf's Village, was still marked "free" after that whole debacle last year.
Then what English word does mean "I have set this product free, and you may do whatever you want with it"?
But what if your needs include long-term maintenance (last-sorting to Do_It/Hire_Someone Yourself, if you have to) or the software being designed to never work against your interests? Free Software isn't the only software that can give you those things, but it's the only software where you know ahead of time that you're getting those things. When you get those things with proprietary software, it's a matter of luck and (especially with the maintenance aspect) only determined years afterwords.
"App Markets" does tend to imply "trivial" mobile applications, though. I'm not sure if people are yet getting themselves locked into proprietary hells with mobile (e.g. you're not using an iPhone to run our company's payroll, you don't have ten thousand documents stored on your Galaxy II which only one application is able to read) so I can see how these are lesser concerns, within this particular context.
So in a sense, I can see how using proprietary software on a phone is much like playing a proprietary game on your otherwise Free Linux PC. We're really just talking about toys here. If/when the Bad Things which tend to happen with proprietary software do eventually happen, you haven't really lost all that much. Few people cry "Oh no, this old game doesn't work on my new system (or I've had to delete it because it's malware), so now my life which depends on it is totally fucked."
I do think this is valuable information, but it doesn't go far enough. You should be able to filter apps by permissions as well, on platforms which support per-operation permissions for applications.
You know what would be even better, though? If the per-operation permissions were settable on a per-application basis, and then spoofed/failed if the app can't work without it. There are plenty of apps that I want to use, but require extraneous permissions for things I don't care about, and/or don't want the app to access. If someone could build a platform which put the permission usage into the user's hands (even as an Android variant, for example), that would be awesome.
Otherwise, right now, Android is the only thing that's keeping Linux even alive,
Red Hat (and their customers) would like a word with you.
Except in Apples: There's no free as in freedom there.
If that's true, how is it possible there are all these open source applications?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem is not the ability to tell the difference between free and non-free licenses in the Android Market, the problem is not being able to tell which software is *really* free. Most of the free apps on the Android Market are trialware. Many of them contain so little functionality compared to their for-pay versions that they're essentially shells for an ad for the pay-for app. IMO, trialware should have its own section because it's not really free as in anything.
Why would Windows users care whether they are using FOSS or not? If they cared, they wouldn't be using Windows.
So would Wall Street and Hollywood and Tivo and scientists and the Internet.