Le samedi 12 février 2011 à 21:44 +0100, Romain d'Alverny a écrit : > On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 20:08, Wolfgang Bornath <[email protected]> > wrote: > > 2011/2/12 Michael Scherer <[email protected]>: > >> > >> Well, to me, the name market and all of it connotations is quite > >> consumerist, and doesn't really fit with the spirit of a community > >> distribution, based on collaboration more than pure commercial > >> exchange as the various proposed name implies. > >> > >> When samuel presented his idea, I was quite interested because it would > >> allows me as a packager to find who would be ok to test packages, > >> to collaborate when i need confirmation for a bug and so on. > >> > >> But it seems that the vast majority of proposal are geared toward > >> replicating the model of Apple Appstore, Google market and others : > >> - app market, app box, software database, app center, Appworld, > >> software portal. > >> > >> Where is the collaboration in all of this ? > > > > Yes, I agree to this point of view. "market" is connected with > > "selling", "app*" is connected with Apple's commercial appstore. > > That a word is used or misused would not justify to abdicate our own > use of it, if it is relevant. Or we are headed for newspeak each time.
Well, some people tried. Ask around you what they understand when we say "hackers" or "communist". Or "geek". I do not like either to change the meaning of word, that's very 1984 as you put it. But I also perfectly realize that we cannot by ourself fight against the rest of the world. > "App" has been used years for software applications before Apple > coined the "AppStore" name. And their application platform has > fundamentally nothing new, but that it does build a hugely profitable > ecosystem, for now at least. > > A "market" is a place where people meet and exchange stuff. From this > have grown many different things of different sizes and implications. > And sometimes, there is sales and purchases there, because that's how > it takes place. I beg to differ, according to historic source, there is sale per definition ( http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/market ). > And nothing here opposes collaboration: it just takes > place in a certain way, provided both parties are happy with the > transaction that took place. For some people, market is also often associated with competition ( especially when associated to the capitalist view of the word, ie "free market" ). And competition is kinda opposite to cooperation ( or at least, not from the same person ). Sure that's not the only meaning, but there is a significant share of people that will associate this rather with "competition" than "cooperation". Again, just do a quick test around you. > "Market" may indeed not be the best word in this very case, but this > reflexion hints something interesting: that you oppose the possibility > to have paid-for stuff witin mageia-app-db. Why not. Is it so really? > Is it assumed? If people ask me the question ( just in case someone is fool enough for that ), I would oppose, yes. Not because I am fundamentally against commercial activities, I do computer support for a fair trade association from time to time that do commercial stuff, and more than once I helped to sell tshirts on free software fair. And I also know that people may need money to live ( mainly because I also do, as surprising it seems ). But I would be against this in madb for 2 main reasons. The first is this was not suggested by anybody so far, and was not expressed in term of requirements. So without this, it is better to say "no until this is more clear", rather than "yes" and change mind later. "Having paid-for applications" is too broad, and this encompass things like "adding flattr button" to "accepting DRM in rpm", or "filtering per country what people can see in the application". The second one is that adding commercial business in a software distribution is gonna be risky and have some side effects, varying on the type of commercial business. The introduction of Kiosk, while based on a interesting idea ( and well, quite new at this time ) and good intentions, had a unfortunate chilling effect on community. And the worst part was that community was in competition with it when kde backports were offered as part of the service. The same goes for the club ( despite being not so bad in term of revenue, until Ubuntu appeared ). While both projects got killed in the end for various reasons, the end result is that Mandriva seems to still suffer from the reputation problem. And that's a sufficient reason to be cautious when adding commercial business in the mix of a free software project. Unfortunately, the PR issue is quite tricky to get right. Let's take for example Canonical. Despite having a strong community, and enough ressources to have a decent marketing team, they suffer from the same type of issue, ie bad PR just du to the fact they try to make a living with commercial business. See the controversy around Ubuntu One naming ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-servers/+bug/375345?comments=all ), the very recent controversy with Banshee ( http://gburt.blogspot.com/2011/02/banshee-supporting-gnome-on-ubuntu.html ), the older one about Rhythmbox and Magnatune ( http://lwn.net/Articles/377314/ , the story do not tell that the rb developers were not aware of the canonical patch ). And that's just the top of those that I can remind of, and a lot of reason of why people do not contribute to Ubuntu. Not everything will end this way of course, and we could provides several example of commercial business mixing well with free software. But it should be clear that answering "yes, we want to do some commercial stuff" requires to be cautious and propose a solid and clear case to avoid misunderstanding, bad PR and in the end lose in the community. I think we can all agree that our community is still recovering from the error of the past, and that it warrant to be more than cautious, extra cautious. So in the end, I think "no for the moment and the first years" is the proper answer. -- Michael Scherer
