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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

ElementaryOS is leaving a lot of money on the table.

The reason is that they have an established user base, and there is an app store, which is very curated.

People would be more than willing to pay for apps on that app store.

Not so many developers are willing, though. The thing is, to publish on the app store, the source code must be publicly available on for instance, github.

If they allowed app developers to sell truly commercial software, ElementaryOS could be a self growing machine, and they could give away the OS for "free" and keep the OS open source.

Maybe it's not as "pure" as what they are doing now, but on the other hand they could reach so many more people if they had more monetary resources.

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elementary is already moving in the right direction by trying to combine flatpak and AppCenter (=payments) -> https://blog.elementary.io/elementary-appcenter-flatpak/

From there it's not a huge jump to allow flatpaks that are closed source and/or not written with GTK, certainly more realistic than with non-sandboxed DEBs.

But as a former elementary user and micro-contributor, I also think that the App Store model has been a disaster for elementary OS. It means that developers who are perfectly capable of fixing the buggy stock apps are incentivized to instead start their own app and (fail to, presumably) get paid for it. Random example from a very prolific developer in the golden age of eOS 5:

https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.artemanufrij.play...

Now this app has been abandoned, and instead of taking over this developer's personal app, the next person who wants to write a music player will start another one. And so on.

If they got decently paid, by allowing proprietary apps, one of the competing apps could stick around by virtue of actually making money.

The ElementaryOS company would also get more cash, and could, (like Apple!) improve a core set of apps.

A "kernel" of good quality Linux apps could also spread to other distributions, and hopefully slowly coalesce around GTK and "ElementaryOS" style GUI as a de-facto standard. (Since the other distros are more accepting of jumbled GUI styles anyway, why not make your app on ElementaryOS first, and distribute that version on the other Linux versions, too.)

Anyway, the hurdle is not technical - flatpaks or no flatpaks. The hurdle is strategy and ideology.

I think that technical hurdles absolutely matter, even more so at the current scale of elementary. And offering apps that are neither sandboxed nor auditable sounds like a PR disaster waiting to happen once someone steals Bitcoin wallets.

Thankfully, the kernel of apps that work across distributions is slowly coming together over at flathub, which is planning to add payment support: https://github.com/flathub/flathub/issues/680

Even the KDE-based Steam Deck, on the opposite end of every spectrum from elementary, embraces flatpak (and flathub).

It's exactly the piece of the puzzle that would have enabled what you suggest: write elementary-flavored apps, sell them everywhere. Given that elementary has already added the Sideload app, I'm not sure if they're as ideological about GTK FOSS purity as it sometimes seems.

Getting Linux desktop users to pay for distros or apps has always been a very tough sell.

Linux users typically demand everything be free. Not a lot of success with commercial software, especially aimed at the consumer.

I’ve advocated for specialisation elsewhere ITT.

Element OS could choose a sector of power users and cater to them with custom features.

They are giving OS for free, no?

Yeah, keep doing it, I meant. My mind was racing, but I see parallels to how Apple "gives away" the OS (really bundles), so MacOS does not have an apparent cost to end users.

ElementaryOS could similarly do that while be the place to gather high quality graphical linux applications. And not only high quality, UX consistent.

Such a shame if it fell down this close to success.

It's really, really hard to start a 2-sided market. But it's almost like Elementary is activelly avoiding a run-away success.

In a way it's like they are naturally a SAAS (curated app store) but they try very very hard to sell a product.

If they do what you suggest, how will they make enough money to survive? Especially when other distros could just copy their features and give them away for free.

They would be in no worse position they are now, the difference is that third party app developers could make money on their platform. For Elementary, it would mean the same or more cash. Likely more.

I don't think it's apparent how little money ElementaryOS needs to thrive as a SAAS style business. They only need a few thousand sales a month through the app store to make a HUGE difference to their bottom line.

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