BTW, great post!

Do you think big software enterprises are really interested to join the linux OS? Let’s have a look. Nowadays the MOST important barrier to common user to migrate to linux is that he/she’s used to manage apps (mostly paid apps) from Windows or Mac OS, and usually enterprises ask for people who knows about Office, Photoshop, etc, instead of Openoffice, Gimp… If these apps would work well and easily in linux, obviously the linux community might grow dramatically fast. What would happen if 60-70% people use linux? The linux community is the most important open source developing community… How long would it take to all the enterprises with linux installed in their PC be migrating to open source apps? Today in a lot of cases, you have better free soft than its paid equivalent… How long would it take to have better open source games than paid ones? How long would it take to software enterprises to close and disappear?

In my opinion, the only chance for paid software developers is to keep the BIG community of PC users away from linux.

There are at least two important technical differences between AppCenter and PackageKit. One is that AppCenter, like Add/Remove Applications and Synaptic before it, will allow interactive configuration during installation (for example, setting the administrator password for a database when installing it), something the PackageKit developers are determined not to allow. Another is that AppCenter is likely to use debtags heavily for presenting software by category, in a way that would be difficult for PackageKit to do if other packaging systems have no equivalent (or have equivalents that work in different ways).

It is quite possible that AppCenter will use some code from PackageKit. We are researching that this week.

You’d have to figure out some way to work out the handling of money for purchases and donations. You could have an open source server backend that each distro could run themselves. And you could even have some sort of affiliate program so for example a smaller distro that was based on Ubuntu could use the backend server that Canonical ran, and in return the smaller distro would take a small cut of the sales that went through its distro.

As long as all the FLOSS software is still available for free as it currently is, and the main software of the distro is FLOSS, I don’t see any problem with introducing a common way for commercial software to be introduced to Linux as well. And if taking cut of commercial sales on their specific distro helps the distros to be financially viable, more power to them.