[maemo-developers] Is mauku open source, i.e free or is in non-free?

[From: Aldon Hynes]

Pauli:

Establishing clear service levels for repositories and sub-repositories wrt
autobuilder and QA : +1
Showing license information in package metadata:  +1

As to handling payments for non-gratis software, there was a good discussion
about adding Donate x$ recently.  In the old days of PC Shareware, it was
not uncommon for developers to distribute software that either asked for a
donation, or required some sort of payment to become fully functional.
These payment mechanisms were not dependent on the distribution mechanisms.

Aldon

-----Original Message-----
From: maemo-developers-bounces at maemo.org
[mailto:maemo-developers-bounces at maemo.org]On Behalf Of Pauli Virtanen
Sent: Thursday, January 28, 2010 12:52 PM
To: maemo-developers at maemo.org
Subject: RE: Is mauku open source, i.e free or is in non-free?


to, 2010-01-28 kello 10:51 -0500, Aldon Hynes kirjoitti:
[clip]
>   I do not see any intended malice in Marius' email and I do not mean to
> pick on him.  However, I am very concerned that much of the tone here may
> drive away mobile phone application developers that are not Linux
> evangelists.  I think that would be unfortunate.  I would like to see the
> N900 and its descendents as dominant devices in the smartphone market.  To
> do so, we need to think about how we relate to all developers.

The main question here is probably whether the 'free' and 'non-free'
repositories (sub-repositories?) have the same service level:
autobuilder and QA mainly.

If they do, then I don't think there is an argument why Maemo couldn't
apply the same policies as Debian or Fedora vs. free/non-free content.
The developer should just pick the correct choice when submitting the
app.

Anyway, the main point seems to be controlling the license situation in
the Maemo repository -- the licenses of the applications are not shown
anywhere in the package metadata. For developers and some users this
would be interesting information to have.

>   Would it make sense for maemo.org to have non-gratis repositories?
> Personally, I think there is value to this.  One of the complaints about
> Apple is the way they control their App Store.  Unless you jailbreak your
> iPhone, you need to run apps from the App Store, which is a pain to get
apps
> into and gives Apple complete control over what gets run on non-jailbroke
> phones.

Non-gratis software requires that someone organizes the payment and
content distribution channels. Nokia as a big company obviously is in a
position to do so, but I'm not sure what maemo.org with its (if I
understand correctly) mainly volunteer work force can do here.

--
Pauli Virtanen



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