On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 10:50:11PM +0200, Mike Hearn wrote: > > At OpenWengo, we have a youngish application which has not yet been > > included in distributions, so we're in the unenviable position that most > > commercial software companies find themselves > > Right, exactly. There's tons of open source stuff out there that isn't > included in distributions for various random reasons. So it becomes > 3rd party, like commercial apps.
All software, open and proprietary, is sort of in this same boat. When we started Inkscape it took a year or more before we were included in many distributions. Early on in our project we handled all the packaging ourselves for redhat, suse, mandrake, debian, etc. In most cases we were lucky to have a passionate user of the given distro to take care of the packaging for us, we just blessed their work as official and let them upload new revisions to our servers. Mike Hearn's Autopackage was also instrumental during this phase, because many times the RPM's didn't work, or we lacked a package for a given platform, so autopackage gave everyone a second chance to get an inkscape binary up and running. In time, as our userbase grew and depended on inkscape, the distros heard and they were able to take over the packaging duties. In some cases they were able to use the package scripts our community members had set up. These days for packaging the only systems we really have to worry about are windows and osx. And we see a HUGE difference in our support burden for windows and osx, vs. Linux where we have a distro layer to screen bugs and handle packaging and distribution for us for free. The amount of time distros will put into your software seems to work out proportionately to how important the software is to the end users. They appreciate it if the upstream provider is willing to accept bug reports from the distro and does packaging and building in a manner consistent with other software. I imagine much of this holds true whether the software is open, or closed-but-free. For true 3rd party closed source software that is sold per-box, I'm not sure what best practices are. It would be interesting to know to what extent distros work with companies operating with traditional commercial software models. It would be interesting to know how much of the porting effort is due to binary compatibility issues, and how much is just debugging installers? If the work is more the latter than the former, then I'd wonder if a good hybrid strategy would be to keep the app closed but open the installation scripts? Bryce _______________________________________________ Desktop_architects mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.linux-foundation.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop_architects
