perhaps FOSSHUB for windows?
Hello @st.raw
And it’s a niche that doesn’t really buy software. Expect lots of praise, but no money.
I suppose you have a point here…
Of course one can not summarize since every Linux user is different…
IMHO, the biggest problem on Linux is that there are not enough artists, right now, using this platform to make a difference. In the long past, most artists worked mainly with Apple hardware for instance.
I have just read some of the last comments on this forum about the Wayland color management to confirm this hunch [1].
Actually, that’s a good point - I wonder what level of requirements there’d be to set up @FossHub with a win/macos client to gain access to that ecosystem.
There are many reasons why free software is not distributed via such stores, and I will share those that I remember:
- Free software was developed before these stores existed.
- As a developer, you choose how you distribute the software to your users.
- There is no way to quickly take care of keeping the software updated on different stores
- Not everyone will agree or like the idea to distribute it via a store that does not fit its own beliefs.
- Free software is (mostly) made available by people who enjoy contributing without expecting a financial contribution.
Etc.
@patdavid, we were working on a software manager for FOSSHUB, but we abandoned the idea temporarily. There are way too many issues (AV, security, automated software updates, OS updates, etc.), and people don’t seem to want such software.
However, FOSSHUB will receive a new, faster, probably uglier layout by the end of this month, followed by a new feature that we hope people will like. I will try to let you guys know as soon as it is ready.
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Oh no! 
Different usergroups, different spending patterns. Some years ago I was in contact with the Pleco (a commercial dictionary software). Their app was iOS only, and was later ported to Android. Even the Android market is much bigger, the iOS side created more revenue.
Personally I don’t really care. For Windows I never use the installed Store. I am aware that some Windows 10 versions can ONLY install store apps - I would not want that version even for free.
MS has been working on a package manager and other Linux-esque tools for some time now. I haven’t been following the development, so I don’t know if it divorced from the walled garden paradigm. Perhaps this is the way forward? That is, in terms of distribution and not so much directing money. We’ll see. See: GitHub - microsoft/winget-cli: WinGet is the Windows Package Manager. This project includes a CLI (Command Line Interface), PowerShell modules, and a COM (Component Object Model) API (Application Programming Interface)..
Earnings from stores - herculean effort to play nice with ecosystem = time and money wasted
vs
Freedom + donations = effort doesn’t consume one’s life + coffee, beer or juice with community
If you look i.e. at OpenCart, it’s a free GNU software (that fully works out of the box), but you can get plugins/apps for it, many are commercial.
I think GIMP also can use some commercial plugins. But recalling how annoying it it was to install a plugin in GIMP I doubt anyone there ever thought about a GIMP Store and charging ‘rent’ for commercial plugins.
But donations more likely won’t work.
Someone actually thought about a GIMP store with only free/libre content though 
That’s a huge misstep, taking down the former extensions page without providing the alternative extensions hub for years. Even if some extensions might not be 100% compatible with the newest Gimp version. Taking away all extensions to improve extension situation in a program, that’s a decision you don’t see every day.
I didn’t see any free content only. Wouldn’t make sense to have that limit.
I’m afraid you are hugely misinformed. The registry was taken down because it was one huge unmaintained security hole that nobody could fix.
Were there any security breaches because of it?
We didn’t want to wait for it to happen.
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Hi all!
As @prokoudine stated, the old registry was put out of its misery because it was unmaintained, both the CMS itself (i.e. no updates for years and we all know how this kind of thing goes for dynamic online code; it’s like giving away a server to malicious people and say “here, take the keys”) as well as user-provided contents (in other words, the registry, in its last years, was filling up with bot accounts and spam with none to filter or clean). As far as I can remember, this website has been first put to read-only (and left for a few years like this) then finally at some point indeed fully decommissioned (the read-only contents got stored in a git repository so none of the old contents is completely dead).
I think most of this happened years before we even started to discuss the idea of a modern extension infrastructure. I don’t even know who used to maintain the registry so they have likely been away for much more than 8 years (since I started contributing in 2012, and unless mistaken, the maintainers/admins of the old registry had already stopped maintaining it, I don’t know since when). I was a GIMP newbie at the time, so my remembrance of things might be a bit off, of course, and I didn’t even really participate to taking down the old registry. This shows even more how this is unrelated to the new project.
So yeah the new project is more of a consequence of the old registry disappearance (though it goes much further than just some CMS to upload random GIMP-related data, which was what the old registry was). And the old project disappeared because it was unmaintained. You don’t leave running code not updated for years on some server on the web, and you don’t leave spam/scam piling up on a forum-like website for years either. This is just about responsible behavior on the internet. 
Actually on a technical side, I am envisioning a system where we could reduce maintenance, possibly with a mix of static and dynamic parts. We obviously cannot go full-static (which is the ideal case, and we do this on our website (well… when I say we, it’s mostly our dear @patdavid which you all know here!)). This won’t be possible on an extension website, at the very least because people need to upload their extensions and pages need to be generated for these. Yet it might be done in a semi-static way.
We even discussed the possibility of commenting on extensions and @patdavid suggested that it could even be done linked with pixls.us infrastructure.
All of these is to minimize from the start the admin needs and not reproduce the same mistakes. Yet we will still need much community help in particular for moderating (not only usage, but even validating contributed plug-ins’ code and other data a minimum). The real success of the new registry is therefore not ensured and will mostly depend on whether the community will contribute.
By the way, this is something I have said a lot lately, because it feels like a lot of people sees GIMP as some sort of huge entity or company or something and take it for granted: GIMP is a fully community-developed software and we are hugely proud of this part. So speaking of “misstep” or “decision” is like saying you are responsible for these. 
Current team entirely relies on the community contributions (of which we are just a part of and anyone, you included, could be a part of). The old registry could have stayed forever if someone had just taken the relay.
I think it might have been vaguely discussed here and there along the years, but for sure there was never any finale decision (also re-read the part above regarding community!). I know that personally I will be in favor of at least promoting the Libre Licensed extensions. I would also definitely be in favor of allowing a link to “donate/fund” an extension creator (which would just redirect to the creator’s donation page).
Now do we want to accept non-FLOSS extensions? I am not fundamentally against. Do we want to add a fee for non-FLOSS extensions creators (as I see it was proposed above)? That’s an interesting idea, because maintaining such an infrastructure is a burden (as I said above, that’s even how the old registry disappeared because none was willing to take the burden). Now will we do it? First on the technical part, it will require us to have a proper entity (which is not the biggest problem) and also to have people to properly manage such funds (it is usually easier to manage “donation” funds than such funds on an accounting point of view, because it can be perceived as “commercial” and this often makes things more complicated on a legal standpoint for non-profit entities; not saying at all it’s not feasible, a lot of non-profits do this kind of things all the time, but it requires proper counseling and management; not just “let’s receive money and think later”). It has to be taken into consideration.
Finally I would definitely not make such a decision alone. I cannot emphasize enough the “community” side of our project and all important decisions are made collectively. Such decision definitely would. But it’s not just a community decision by the way, but also community work and responsibilities. If anyone wants this but none is willing to make it happen (both code side and legal and accounting sides; yes it also means some people have to take responsibility for accounting when money comes into play), it won’t happen (we can’t force people, that would not be collaborative work anymore, but some kind of community dictatorship). This is why I say that GIMP is community developed, because it requires contributors to take responsibilities and do the actual work.
On my side, I will focus on making the technical side work.
Last but not least, things are allowed to evolve. We could (maybe even “should”?) also start small, maybe only allowing FLOSS extensions, with limited acceptance until we get proper community traction with more moderators/reviewers, and without any money concept at first (as it makes things more complicated), then maybe enhance the things as we go, slowly open the valves to allow more types of extensions, and licenses, etc.
I don’t know, we’ll see.
For the time being, I remind everyone that if you want to see any of this to ever happen, you can contribute to the effort, not only with code, but also financially for anyone who wishes. I have single-handedly worked on this on and off for a few years now (in between the many other stuff I worked on in GIMP) but funding is not so great so far.
Our project has a liberapay page:
We are also on Patreon:
And here for other donation methods (including more direct ones through the non-profit which manages the work done on this topic):
So yeah, that is the current state of the project and some history brief on how we got there.
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I just want to add that KDE have a goal to ship more of their software to end users.
This is part of there goal right now among improve Wayland support and consistency.
https://community.kde.org/Goals/All_about_the_Apps
KDE have been shipping many of their apps to Windows store. With Labplot being the latest one.
You can search for KDE in MS store and some of their apps will be there.