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You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that's what happened in the Mono debate late last week. "Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction," RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation's site. Of course, rather than settling the debate, Stallman's proclamation only fanned the flames higher, resulting in a raging inferno.
Linux Package Manager = iPhone App Store
Posted by: dkegel 2009-07-02 06:33:58 In reply to: Katherine Noyes
The package manager is in essence an "app store".
Would you call application installation broken
on the iPhone? No; the app store works great
there. The challenge for each Linux distribution
is to make it easier for third parties to get
apps into their app store.
Ubuntu is actively working on this in two ways.
First, they have a partner repository, which
is exactly like the traditional app store;
third parties pay a small fee to Canonical,
and their app gets listed in "Add/Remove Software"
and hosted on Canonical's servers.
Second, Ubuntu is considering doing the same
thing with apps hosted on the vendor's own
servers. A few vendors - google and adobe come
to mind - already run Linux repositories, and
Canonical is willing to include those in their
software list so that users can easily discover
those apps via "Add/Remove Software". See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/JauntyTrustedThirdParties
The Linux Foundation is working a different
angle: by maintaining the LSB and providing
tools for developers to check their software
for compliance, they're making it much more
likely that software can be compiled once
and run on all Linux systems (of the same CPU
type). See
http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/lsb
None of this comes easy for developers
who are new to Linux and are used to other
systems, but it can work well once you know
the ropes.
Would you call application installation broken
on the iPhone? No; the app store works great
there. The challenge for each Linux distribution
is to make it easier for third parties to get
apps into their app store.
Ubuntu is actively working on this in two ways.
First, they have a partner repository, which
is exactly like the traditional app store;
third parties pay a small fee to Canonical,
and their app gets listed in "Add/Remove Software"
and hosted on Canonical's servers.
Second, Ubuntu is considering doing the same
thing with apps hosted on the vendor's own
servers. A few vendors - google and adobe come
to mind - already run Linux repositories, and
Canonical is willing to include those in their
software list so that users can easily discover
those apps via "Add/Remove Software". See
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/JauntyTrustedThirdParties
The Linux Foundation is working a different
angle: by maintaining the LSB and providing
tools for developers to check their software
for compliance, they're making it much more
likely that software can be compiled once
and run on all Linux systems (of the same CPU
type). See
http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/lsb
None of this comes easy for developers
who are new to Linux and are used to other
systems, but it can work well once you know
the ropes.
