@aikiwolfie:
Canonical has a for-pay store front already… its a website.

store dot canonical dot com

There is a tiny software section. It would be interesting to know how many people have purchased software through that interface..but I doubt Canonical is going to release hard numbers on that ever.

-jef

You’re right. Canonical does have a web based store. It’s pretty barren. Always has been and likely always will be. Canonicals existing store has never been highly publicised. Never been pushed. It’s always just sort of been there.

Click ‘N’ Run is also still limping along. It has never really taken off in a big way. If it had we’d all be using it. But we’re not. People seem to like the idea of an App Store. That’s people, not geeks.

An app store is more like a software repository. Except you pay for what you use. It works for Apple and it works for Googles Android. Why not Ubuntu?

But, I agree, proprietary software should be available to the user at his or her discretion.

Now on a serious note. I think they should keep the “Add/Remove Applications” as it is and make another application called “Software Store” which will offer only proprietary applications for users who are willing to pay.

This way lots of developers or companies who are writing software applications for Windows will be interested in porting their applications to Ubuntu.

If it becomes a trend, then more Linux distributions will adopt this idea. After a while, we will see more and more applications that people use on Windows available on Linux too, so people will no longer complain that they would love to use Linux as their main operating system but they need some applications which are available on Windows only.

Exactly. There are lots of programs and libraries that you use every day that request donations, but you’ll never see that because you don’t visit their web sites. Firefox added a donation field to their Add-on page, so you can keep track of which projects you’ve donated to (vs the ones that suck or that you barely use, and don’t feel any need to donate to). I think something similar should be built into the Add/Remove programs tool.

Some FOSS stuff is written by paid employees (Mozilla, Canonical, Novell, etc.) but other stuff is written by volunteers. I think having a “donations tracker” (alongside pay-to-download apps) would be a great change and help improve the quality of open source software (and improve Ubuntu’s compatibility with commercial software, which I don’t believe to be inherently evil, like some people…)

“However I see this new application as needless duplication unless Canonical”

I’ve always thought this, too. How many different Apt front-ends are there, now? And they feel they have to make another one instead of building on something that already exists? If there’s one thing open source is great at, it’s duplicating effort; producing mediocre implementations of the same functionality over and over again. How many media players are there for Linux now? Maybe they should call it “YASS”, for “Yet Another Software Store”.

“There is a tiny software section. It would be interesting to know how many people have purchased software through that interface..but I doubt Canonical is going to release hard numbers on that ever.”

I’d never even heard of that section. I wonder how many people have.

“if you have to buy shit, its not free
they are on their way to becoming microsoft jr.”

And maybe once they start making a little money, they’ll have the resources to make their OS run more smoothly, like Microsoft’s.

I’m not being sarcastic. A modern Windows installation is better than Ubuntu in lots of ways. It would be great if Ubuntu reached the same level of quality someday, while still providing all the freedoms of open source.