Purism's PureOS To Explore OSTree/Flatpak, Wants To Develop An "Ethical App Store"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism's PureOS To Explore OSTree/Flatpak, Wants To Develop An "Ethical App Store"

Purism's PureOS downstream of Debian that is shipped on their Librem laptops and is also planned as part of the software stack making up their in-development Librem 5 smart-phone is planning for more changes...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PureOS-Flatpak-Ethical-AppStore

[starshipeleven]

Are there any unethical app stores?

Google Play, Apple Store, Microsoft Store.

[Weasel]

The only ethical app store is no app store at all.

[L_A_G]

Care to elaborate?

I suspect all you're going to get is a rant about how applications and being closed source and having copy protection is totally wrong and shouldn't be allowed. It's the usual "private ownership is theft" stuff you get from the Stallman types and those people can be truly fanatic.

Each to their own... While preferring open over closed I don't think people should be forced to distribute their software as open source and if they want to protect it with node-locked DRM then that's their (regrettable) choice.

[brrrrttttt]

I suspect all you're going to get is a rant about how applications and being closed source and having copy protection is totally wrong and shouldn't be allowed. It's the usual "private ownership is theft" stuff you get from the Stallman types and those people can be truly fanatic.

Each to their own... While preferring open over closed I don't think people should be forced to distribute their software as open source and if they want to protect it with node-locked DRM then that's their (regrettable) choice.

True freedom doesn't fit the GNU philosophy.

[oiaohm]

I suspect all you're going to get is a rant about how applications and being closed source and having copy protection is totally wrong and shouldn't be allowed. It's the usual "private ownership is theft" stuff you get from the Stallman types and those people can be truly fanatic.

Each to their own... While preferring open over closed I don't think people should be forced to distribute their software as open source and if they want to protect it with node-locked DRM then that's their (regrettable) choice.

Its not just about that.

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/18922

We do have problem on a lot of the existing appstores. If I want to ship source and binary most appstores don't support this. So really its not just about closed source its also about the appstore not provide the frameworks to make open source license conformance easy to-do.

Yes a appstore should really handle both closed source and open source fairly well in my point of view.

Its not ethical really to ship open source copyleft licensed binaries and not provide framework to ship source.

Also when you ship by apple app store for example you have to agree to extra terms on your binaries license that they decided. So what is ethical about the store you are selling your product in decided the terms you product will be sold under to customers. A store trying to alter device warranty would not be on right.

[starshipeleven]

Care to elaborate?

What others said. Contrary to what L_A_G thinks, I'm just answering what they most likely meant with "ethical", I'm not a Stallman disciple myself.

[starshipeleven]

I suspect all you're going to get is a rant about how applications and being closed source and having copy protection is totally wrong and shouldn't be allowed

When did I ever gave the impression of being a stallman follower again?

Then again, there is indeed people that to some extent think like that and Purism is trying to market their stuff to them.

[starshipeleven]

True freedom doesn't fit the GNU philosophy.

true freedom is a theoretical concept, you always shaft someone.

GNU mostly shafts commercial software developers to give more freedom to hobbist software developers and tinkerers, and to some extent the end users too.

Commercial licenses usually shaft the consumer to give freedom to the software developer.

It's just a matter of choosing sides.

[schmidtbag]

Care to elaborate?

I'm not entirely sure about Apple's store, but Google's and MS's are a bit unethical. MS's was made deliberately to cut out the "middle-man" (this is one of the primary reasons SteamOS was made). Google meanwhile has made several efforts to prevent other app marketplaces (for various products of theirs, not just specific to Android) from taking sales from them. Google makes claims like "it's for security purposes" but I highly doubt that; most people who don't use Google's marketplaces have intentionally gone out of their way to do so, presumably knowing the potential risks. So that being said, it's not like Google has any responsibility in the event anything goes wrong.