Comments on: Novell's open-source app store: We've heard this one before
Novell reportedly will be the newest member of the Apple App Store clone club, but its open-source shop would be even less necessary than those other clones.
Most Popular
15 sites that went kaput in 2009
Web sites launch all the time, but they also shut their doors. We highlight 15 that bit the dust this year.
Top 10 news stories of the decade
Let the debate begin: Was the iPhone more important than iTunes? Was anything bigger than Google finding a great business model? CNET offers its list of the 10 most important stories of the '00s.
About The Open Road
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Add this feed to your online news reader
The Open Road topics
The interview somehow got lost in translation. The comments were made in connection with Moblin, which Novell is strongly supporting. We are working closely with netbook manufacturers and others to ensure strong application support for Moblin-based devices. Sorry for the confusion.
Ian Bruce / Novell.
Canonical and/or Novell could make it work by including proprietary enterprise applications for a cost alongside FOSS for free, but I think they are already working on something of that concept.
Perhaps, as you say, Canonical and/or Novell could help to move this concept along, to make buying & installing apps as easy with desktop Linux, as it is with smartphones.
Perhaps it would even make sense to integrate the Moblin app store with the Android Market, since there are plans in the works to run Android apps on Moblin. Then a user can find all the apps they want/need in one uniform storefront. This would even support a scenario where a user is running the Moblin desktop, but is only using Android apps. Cool!
- by ArtInvent June 9, 2009 10:16 AM PDT
- This idea is the very heard of most Linux systems, and IMO is the killer app of Linux. It's called the application repository system ('repo' for short) as you allude to, but it's actually already completely successful and integrated to most Linux distros and has been for years. Ubuntu users, for example have a quick way to access the repos, right on the root menu: it's called 'Add/Remove'. There are hundreds of recommended apps nicely categorized. Click, download, install. If you want the full unlimited menu of every possible available app (running into the tens of thousands) then you will use the more elaborate Synaptic, where you can add anyone's third party repo fairly easily and browse everything in one place. In either case, it's still just click-and-install simple.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(8 Comments)Again, this is a completely open system, and companies, developers, organizations, and even individuals can and do host their own app repositories for anyone to use. And yes, there are proprietary apps and closed source drivers etc in the repos as well.
The other brilliant thing about this system is that all of these apps are now centrally monitored, and any time an update is available for any app whatsoever, it can be automatically downloaded and installed. You can even do this completely automatically without any user input - it's completely up to the administrator.
If our intrepid blogger had any familiarity at all with Linux, he would know this. As I say, to me it's the probably THE killer feature of Linux that doesn't get a ton of press and I really don't know why.