Certainly. This is far from the biggest problem though. There are entire classes of applications that you can't find in the Mac App Store even when they're fr

Certainly. This is far from the biggest problem though. There are entire classes of applications that you can't find in the Mac App Store even when they're free (like web browsers!) so it's not just money that is keeping them away. Worse, apps that "add on" to popular products do make it in, creating this weird situation where you search for $POPULAR_THING and you don't find $POPULAR_THING but you do find all kinds of "99 cent plug-in for $POPULAR_THING" products. It really serves to clutter up and lower the perceived value of the entire store. Apple should be treating this as the way to find and install Mac software, and lower every single wall if necessary until the likes of Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and Adobe are all on board with that. If price is the issue, remind big developers that there are costs to running an app store but negotiate with them until they are willing. For the good of the platform. If the sandbox is the sticking point (as it is perhaps for Firefox and Chrome), one option is to add an "Advanced Install" button so that all software can still be available on the App Store even if there is an extra hurdle. Apple could still set strict sandbox requirements for default installs. [The sandbox is one reason I didn't submit my terminal app because I cannot find any reasonable default sandbox that wouldn't utterly cripple shells and other common sub-processes.] Licensing should certainly not be an issue. The fact is, there is a ton of really important free software on the Mac and some of it is GPL. Apple may not like this but they cannot deny that the value of their entire platform has grown because of such software. They should add an option to bundle or link source code with App Store entries. And if they really can't bring themselves to do that, the very least they should allow is an official entry for every piece of software, even if that entry is only allowed to link to an external web site for licensing reasons.