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I hope the pinephone never has app stores. The "work with the community to merge your software into the repo" model is much better for things that actually help
by swiley 6y ago
I hope the pinephone never has app stores. The "work with the community to merge your software into the repo" model is much better for things that actually help people. Apple's AppStore is best for extracting money from people while siloing their data.
- viro 6y agoThis is so divorced from reality I don't know where to start. There is effectively no difference between "apt install widget-a" and installing it from a "App Store" other than the App Store option lets the dev feed his family if he needs to to. at least from a user stand point.
- swiley 6y agoNow many individual app developers are feeding their family with app store installs vs the individual OSS developers doing the same?
- jascii 6y agoOne could argue that it is exactly this financial incentive that causes all the mislabeled useless apps on the app stores.
- viro 6y ago>financial incentive ? ... financial incentives is the motivation for most labor.
- anoncake 6y agoFinancial incentives redirect labour from useful to profitable activities.
- viro 6y agoYou mean labor is directed towards actions that produce more value than simply the labor put into them. Odd, its like you think that's a bad thing.
- anoncake 6y agoThat is literally the opposite of what I wrote.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI think this comes down to whether you agree that money == value, and that value == utility (i.e. that people will pay for things that they find useful)
- jascii 6y agoThat statement only holds if you only define "value" as financial gain. I would consider that a dangerous simplification.
- aidenn0 6y agoSince much of monetary value is related to scarcity, labor is directed to reduce scarcity, not to actions that produce social value. The pool of people who are capable of collecting garbage is non-scarce, so the price for labor is relatively small compared to the social value it produces. Advertising is so well rewarded because the attention of consumers is a very scarce resource, so companies put massive amounts of money into capturing some of that.
- cubano 6y agoyou cannot possibly be postulating that profitable activities can never be considered useful, are you?
- jascii 6y agoI do not see OP stating that "useful" and "profitable" are mutually exclusive. I think it is widely understood that there is "usefulness" that is not satisfied by profit driven organisations, that is why we have non-profits and public institutions.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoCall me cynical, but most non-profits seem to be more interested in paying salaries and fundraising than in the actual thing they're supposed to be "about". And public institutions may serve a useful function, but again seem to be mostly about civil service powerbroking and providing extremely safe employment.
- jascii 6y agoFine, I'll call you cynical... ;P There are certainly (often larger) nonprofits with a tendency of overpaying their leadership and/or pushing policies favored by their corporate funders. I would in this context however not conflate "most visible" (ie largest advertising budgets) with "most". Most nonprofits I have worked with are ran and operated by hardworking people on minimal budgets.
- wott 6y agoNote that he didn't say overpaying, just paying. It is true that in all organisations (including those associations), as time passes, professionalisation progresses, headcount raises, administrative and secondary tasks develop; and self-preservation, self-replication become a goal of its own. There is a whole range of people (I don't mean leaders or managers, but bottom/middle people) who make a career in all those non-profits, para-public and semi-public associations (all of them living mostly from subsidies), hoping from one to another. At least it goes like that in my country, it has developed a lot in the last 30 years.
- fouric 6y ago...and, since many (not all) profitable activities turn out to be useful, financial incentives still end up incentivizing useful activities. For instance: [IDE company] employees are incentivized to develop [IDE], I buy [IDE], [company] makes a profit, and the value that I get out of [IDE] means that their activities were useful. Good stuff.
- anoncake 6y agoSure. But others are entirely useless or even harmful. If you want people to implement dark patterns, tracking, advertising, or walled gardens, you have to pay them.
- jascii 6y agoResearch has actually indicated that the link between financial incentives and motivation to work is actually very small: https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv Thus widespread availability of "labor of love" open source software, and the relative crappiness of a lot of commercial software.
- bordercases 6y agoYou still hit solvency constraints at some point.
- reader_mode 6y agoMost OSS is funded by corporate and wouldn't exist without it
- jascii 6y agoCorporations do provide funds for some larger projects, that is however not anywhere near "most".
- greyhair 6y agoMoney has a huge affect, up to the point that your needs are met. Yes, if your needs are met, and you have time to pursue things you enjoy, you do that, but first, your needs must be met. If I didn't require an income to cover a family of five, I would be retired, and doing whatever it is that I love at any moment. But instead, I work for a living, for money, to meet our needs.
- rorykoehler 6y agoThat’s a byproduct of capitalism with insufficient safety nets.
- viro 6y ago-_- I just wanna point out the homeless rate in China is higher than the United States, and you still have to pay rent in China too. So it's not really a capitalism problem its a being alive problem.
- rorykoehler 6y agoWhat does China have to do with this?
- viro 6y ago@rorykoehler It's the most well known non capitalist society.
- rorykoehler 6y agoChina is a capitalist state in all but name.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y agoI'm beginning to think the whole "capitalist"/"communist" dialectic is meant to make people think there's a "capitalist" economic system or a "communist" economic system, whereas when the communists get control they make a "state capitalist" or "party capitalist" system that looks much like "capitalism" except it has a severely authoritarian political system (which everyone is told is a symptom of "capitalism.") In other words, "communism" is an authoritarian/dictatorial political system that masquerades as an economic system until it doesn't have to put up with any dissent, at which point it goes back to "capitalism." (State or Party or whatever. I think they call their version "with chinese characteristics" in the west.)
- 6y ago
- ohmeego 6y agoIn fact with the last go round of Linux phones(Nokia N900/N9), the app store was just a gui in front of apt.
- fsflover 6y agoThere is nothing wrong with App Stores. See: F-Droid and GNU/Linux repositories. The problem is in multinational monopolies.
- swiley 6y agoThe GNU/Linux repos work exactly the way I described in my post. Fdroid probably does too but I haven't looked closely at it.
- slim 6y agoIt mostly works as you described + the app lets you add any repository.
- viro 6y agoPeople use iOS/iPhones BECAUSE of how tightly controlled the App Store is. It's like Atari vs Nintendo. If I wanted pure "freedom" I would have gotten an android, since they have at least fixed their performance issues now.
- grey_earthling 6y agoThe best of both worlds is possible. I can install $StrictGNULinuxDistro with very strict policies about software freedom and quality and so on; and then if I want to, I can add Flathub, $OtherFlatpakRepo and/or $ThirdPartyDebOrRpmOrWhateverRepo as well. Gatekeeping may be a feature or a bug depending on your opinion, but we don't all have to have the same priorities for our software repos, because we can each choose which repos we use.
- imwillofficial 6y agoYeah because flatpacks are a joy to use. /sarc The older I get, the less time I have to fumble around with crappy user interfaces on half assed software. I’m far more willing to pay, or even used closed source software because it gets the job done, and sparks joy.
- 6y ago
- jordache 6y ago> The "work with the community to merge your software into the repo" model is much better for things that actually help people. So you ratchet up the friction for entry, that helps devs? Say what you want about the app store, but across all the devs for iOS, how many would go through the trouble of self distributing their product? Marketing, infrastructure, payment system etc... ? The app store is a tremendously low friction way for market penetration. Sure, we may need to calibrate the revenue sharing arrangement. However the "merge your software into the repo" as an either/or alternative is laughable.
- ddevault 6y agoThe benefits go both ways: the community also reaches out to the developers. A lot of software is added to repos without any input from the devs. The plain truth of the matter is that commercial app stores are malware distributors, and community repositories are not. The commercial app store model does not work, at least not for the user. Also: not all software is commercial, and not everyone wants their phones commercialized. Your business model is often simply not welcome on the platform. You're not entitled to make money. If we want a platform without commercial software incentives, that's our business, not yours.
- jordache 6y ago> not everyone wants their phones commercialized. While your statement is technically correct, the number of users falling into that category, and would go the extra effort to ensure a non-commercialized day to day phone is usable, is infinitesimally small. Most users embrace the convenience associated with the commercial solution. This will be a tiny niche phone
- ddevault 6y ago>This will be a tiny niche phone Yes. So what?
- imwillofficial 6y ago
- MartijnBraam 6y agoOh yeah people really want it to be a second android/ios, it's quite annoying