The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
About Those App Stores (2024-12-09)
"Appstores" sound like a sensible solution to the challenge of helping software developers sell and distribute their software, provided we are not aware of how software was distributed and paid for before today's internet. That is, before the current pressure to reduce the web part of the internet to little more than a catalogue with a shopping cart and thousands of spy scripts attached to it, carved up among a few monopolistic corporations. If nothing else, this results in a considerable amount of centralization. What seems good about such centralization is the creation of a sort of consistent marketplace where smaller sellers don't have to set up and maintain their virtual storefronts, they just pay rent to hang out their shingle and sell their stuff. No matter how often reality shows this model facilitates extortion by the party who can manage to control a centralized marketplace and then engross as many sellers to using it as possible, people keep trying this. Yet it clearly is feasible to refuse to participate in the appstore model, and many older, not small to medium size software and software-service tied firms do so, and among those are both free/libre committed organizations and those sticking to proprietary software instead.
I suspect a great many of us, and in the "us" yes I am explicitly including myself, missed the possible dangers because the advent of online music stores were the obvious analogy, albeit as it turned out an incomplete one. By rights, online music stores should make it possible to make massive back catalogues available and ease the pressure on artists with smaller fan bases when they are seeking to record and distribute their music. It even looked feasible to find a better way to handle the singles verus albums problem, because all too many artists have a knack for singles but are hopeless at albums. In one of those backhanded seeming "good deeds" corporations are known for, when apple made a success of what has become one of the biggest online music stores, it apparently muscled DRM out of music sales after initially having it. Now DRM has got in via the back door, and too many music artists are caught between two stools. They either use an online distribution and sales a service outlet of some kind, usually surrendering a cut of each sale, or they can commit to setting up and maintaining their own small-scale website and store. But of course, the store will likely be a plug-in from yet another centralized company that offers support of sales and distribution "as a service." But that is just one set of headaches.
The only proprietary software program I praise as the exception that proves the rule is BBEdit. It's amazing, and as best I can tell no other coding IDE with a firm orientation towards website development and maintenance matches it. There are valiant free/libre projects that come remarkably close despite having one-person or tiny team developers and maintainers and founded much more recently, such as bluefish and pluma, but no real match. Having spent a long time primarily in the macosx world, I purchased BBEdit from barebones software directly before there was an apple appstore for the desktop. It took some time before barebones software could sort out an apple appstore purchase option, and I never opted to switch to that option. There are several reasons for this, first and formost being the excellent notification and update service barebones software had already implemented. Probably what seems the weakest reason is simply that I am ornery and saw no reason to change things. Plus, free/libre software is the primary software I used by then, pushed along on that path by apple's decision to cripple applescript support and leave applescript documentation in a hot mess. And then one day, I went to the macosx dock, and saw one of the rarely used apple application icons with a strange to me white circle with a white diagonal line across it. Then error messages began to pop up. By then Mozilla had suffered an issue with its servers that caused firefox extensions to fail verification and refuse to load, so these messages were more intelligible than they might otherwise have been. Now I had undeniable proof that applications "purchased" through apple's appstore dialled home constantly to be recertified as duly purchased and therefore allowed to run. If any of those programs had been mission critical for me, well, let's just say it would have been bad. The only exception was BBEdit, which to this day, along with the other barebones software offerings, is still a proper application, not a subscription. The appstore issue didn't just affect apple's offerings of course, it affected any program purchased through the store with its associated licensing arrangement. As can be imagined, this experience gave me a lot to think about, and contributed directly to my decision not to purchase apple products again when upgrading my hardware stack.
The touchy part when it comes to appstores and similar options online and off, is the sense that they represent a way to delegate away a task at least perceived as time consuming or difficult to manage to somebody better at it or with more time. It seems like a time saver at least, even if not necessarily much of a money saver. And these perceptions can be true, and it is even possible in many cases to find free/libre software based options and other means to avoid spying and what amounts to getting stuck in a position of "Nice business/website/podcast/or whatever you got there. It'd be too bad if our verification server went down, wouldn't it?" This acknowledged, those perceptions are often not true, especially for the majority of us who are not trying to do larger scale, more security-challenging tasks like running email servers or providing secure online sales. If it is still difficult to do what we need to do, I think this means not necessarily that we need these "helpful" centralizing "services," but more likely the task is needlessly difficult. This often means there is a dearth of documentation, or the documentation is too telegraphic because it is still not much more than the crib notes an expert uses. Appstores came in at a time when it was not quite so clear and easy even to carry out such sensible steps as checksumming, and when far too many people were convinced the command line is scary. In other words, they were not so much a help as a means to encourage people to learn to be helpless around computers and anything else "complicated," so they treat what should be tools as a sort of master. Obviously this is a viciously unethical and disrespectful line for the various large computer and software companies to take, and it must be opposed.
One of the more troubling bad habits of all too many free/libre software activists is their insistence on referring to graphical user interfaces as "slobberware" and indulging in a level of insult and hate against apple products that remarkably outstrips their expressions of contempt for microsoft and ibm. Part of what makes it too bad is how their genuine concern and critique gets lost in an apparent contempt for people who appreciate being able to use a well-designed graphical user interface in combination with the command line, and even more so anyone who would like the computer interface they use all day to not be an aesthetic shitshow. Their concern that the design and changes to create graphical user interfaces are often hostile to any desire or commitment to learn how to operate, administer, customize, and program the computer, reflecting an ongoing attempt to destroy general purpose computing outside of military and spying institutions is more than borne out by our present circumstances. But there is a difficulty here, because a great many of those activists seem caught on what they perceive as a dilemma. They actually aren't committed to ensuring general purpose computers are accessible and able to be managed and secured by the public at large. They would much prefer general purpose computers without the surveillance and other interference, but best accessible only to a sort of pseudo-priesthood of computer science majors or similar. They value the ways in which they have readjusted themselves to the computer, and are contemptuous of approaches to programming and hardware intended to make it easier for anyone to work with a computer without having to learn arcane commands or read circuit diagrams.
Thankfully this particular sort of free/libre software activist and their free/libre hardware counterparts are not very common nowadays. They get this is not a real dilemma. To achieve the preservation and improvement of free/libre hardware and software, it turns out that making it possible for anyone to be able to learn how to customize computer hardware and software without being forced to grovel for permission to a corporation is the better approach. After all, whether a person opts for some version of gnu/linux or free/openbsd, they can choose not to install a graphical user interface, remove one already present on the system, or simply never run it. None of these things are options on the typical mainstream closed operating systems. The issue was the closure of options, a closure of dishonest and disrespectful kind. Why, even "appstores" have variants that are not the nightmare roach hotels with ever increasing fee cuts for the corporate proprietors these days, including what aren't "stores" but graphical user interfaces on top of apt (gnu/linux) or ports (bsd). How ironic those interfaces are majority flaky and slow, so for my part I tend to manage software from the command line these days. The exception in my experience so far, is MATE's software centre.
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