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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

The way they are advertising snap in a completely unrelated product is so weird. Their marketing team needs to learn that it would only push the developer's mind into thinking it is forced upon and not actually useful. I would expect similar push by companies like Oracle to their clients not Canonical to free developers.

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Their entire IoT program seems to revolve around hooking companies on using Snap. This makes sense financially, because if you can trick a company into rolling out their IoT network through Snap, a store Canonical is the only one in control of, they practically lock these customers into their business model.

Once you've deployed a thousand IoT devices, you don't just re-develop the entire system to use Docker/Balena/whatever when Canonical announces it'll start charging money for something that's currently free. The price difference needs to be smaller than the added development cost or it'd be a waste of company resources.

Canonical is pretty open about the limitations of any free offering and pretty open that this is really intended for a paying audience. I don't see any attempt to bait and switch going on.

I don't think it's unrelated, I think they think the snap format is good for distributing and updating embedded applications, such as those you'd use with signage, easily. But no idea how realistic that is.

When you see the phrase "it's worth mentioning" in a press release, you can be pretty sure it's not worth mentioning.

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