On Wed, Dec 28, 2011, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Free Software on Android": > There is nothing to stop anyone from developing a free app for > Android but there currently is a high cost of entry into the market, > the price of the device. As Android devices go down in price, and
Actually, the only cost of entry into Google's market is a one time fee of $25. I even suggested the possibility (that I have an itch to actually go ahead and do...) that one person pays this $25 once, and then uploads a bunch of free software from various people, using his one market account, making it appear on the main Android market and not the esoteric F-Droid market, and free for the free software writers. The prices of the Android devices are low, and going down. I bought mine for $189. That's even cheaper than the cheapest desktop computer I ever bought (which was 1000 shekels, as I reported in this mailing list earlier this year). > It was that way with Linux too, device drivers only existed for > those devices standard on a commodity PC. If someone in the Linux > community had a different device and wanted to write a driver, they > would, and many of them were written by amateurs (and performed > accordingly). I could accept that Android are new, so there are still few apps for it. What bothers me more is that everywhere I look, I can find apps that people *have* written, but are either for-money or free-with-ads (which basically means they can't be open source, otherwise people can remove the ads). E.g., I looked for a Wikipedia browsing app, and found a nice one, but with ads, and of course not open source. What the ****?? Thousands of people spent millions of hours writing this encyclopedia without making a penny, and this schmoe thinks he should make money by showing ads on their efforts? Once someone publishes a real free-software app that (in this example) browses wikipedia, all the for-money or ad-filled applications will be forgotten, just like dozens of "shareware" text editors have gone the way of the dodo, but vi and emacs remain to this day. I'm also curious, are people making real money from this market? By "real" I mean something they can actually support themselves with, not $100 or even $1000. By "people" I mean a significant percentage of the app writers, not the top 1 percent successes like "Angry Birds". My guess is that people *think* they will make money this way, which is why they do it, but at the end most of them will make peanuts. It's like the "shareware" phenomenon of the 1990s. > In your case, you have the device, you can obtain the development > kit and the market account, feel free to develop something. Maybe > you have that right combination of abilities to produce an app that > people want. I already wrote a tiny widget which I needed, and I based it, unsurprisingly, on some free software widget which I found. So the availability of free software on Android is very important for developers who want to learn - I just wish there were more of it. And of course, before I can publish anything I did, I need to learn a bit more so I won't be ashamed of my code ;-) So far I only spent around a day on learning Android programming - but the result - of being able to program my own Linux-based mobile device - is very satisfying. > As for making money on Emacs and ls, well, Emacs was hardly a > revolutionary product, it was just another text editor in a field of > lots of text editors, that just sort of grew. There are many text > editors available for Linux and I doubt that most Linux users don't > use it. I know for sure that most UNIX users don't. Most android apps aren't revolutionary as well. Like I say, I found ad-supported Wikipedia apps (when one could just use a normal browser...), I saw an ad-supported memory game for kids (yeah, right, my 3 year old kid can actually read those ads...), and a lot of other mundane crap that isn't free software, but could have been. It took me a lot of effort to find an example free-software widget that I can build on - most of the fairly trivial widgets on the market are free, but their source is not available. -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Dec 28 2011, [email protected] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Tact: The ability to describe others as http://nadav.harel.org.il |they see themselves. - Abraham Lincoln _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
