This will encourage Win 7 phone app development.. or not

I can see the motivation to entice established developers to produce great products, but the cow is out of the barn in terms of paying for more than a few smart phone apps.

I doubt they'll never reach the critical mass of active phones if they don't offer a considerable selection of cool free (or really inexpensive) stuff to compare with the offerings on other platforms.

Regrettably, Microsoft's products never seem to gain traction until the point that Microsoft wants them dead.
 
But this doesn't ban free apps, "Only" apps using FOSS (Free Open Source Software) correct?

More NIH* thinking at work?

* Not Invented Here

Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 
The policy speaks to the licensing terms of the app itself. Most simply, it says that anything that is GPL-like licensed won't be allowed. If Microsoft can't charge some sort of fee to distribute the title, it is summarily prohibited.

An argument could be made that they don't want free development tools to be used so that they can make necessary changes to the OS without notice but as we've likely all observed, the Microsoft development tool built applications are often the first to break; something about dependence on undocumented facilities.
 
Charging for distribution is NOT against GPL...
No, but charging a price of more than the reasonable cost for distribution is. I believe you can't reasonably measure the infinitesimal cost of electronic distribution at the individual transaction level.
 
No, but charging a price of more than the reasonable cost for distribution is.
No, it isn't.
If you want to burn CDs with Ubuntu and sell them for $10 a piece - go ahead, no license violation (doesn't mean you will sell many).

The GPL license doesn't tinker with qualitative components.
It has enough trouble (e.g. TiVo) to deal with quantitative ones...

Diogen.
 
No, but charging a price of more than the reasonable cost for distribution is. I believe you can't reasonably measure the infinitesimal cost of electronic distribution at the individual transaction level.

What about the following costs as part of the distribution:

Servers (a lot for redundancy and throughput p
Storage (redundant highly available and fast aren't cheap)
Backup (you always need backups)
Local network infrastructure
Redundant WAN drops
The facilities
The staff
Software development costs

These are all big $ items and they are all up front costs.

Many overlook this type of stuff as part of the costs but they are real and big.



Moar gees with gginggerbread and tapatalk!
 

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