I agree.

But this wording may easily be mis-understood. What will come to mind to most people as their first and only idea when reading this: “ah, he speaks of ISVs, who want to sell their proprietary stuff, make their profits and not contribute anything to FOSS”.

While these proprietary ISVs are part of the “third parties”, to me they are not the most important ones.

If I use openSUSE, and want to use the “scli” (SNMP Command Line Interface: there is no SUSE-RPM available! But there are .debs. Now you let me install that .deb on my openSUSE via a $whatever API and $foobar KIT, and you helped me making install a “third party software” on my openSUSE.

If I use Fedora 8, and want to use “kinternet” (a useful KDE-based frontend to PPP-dialup connections, helping me to establish UMTS links when I’m “on the road”): there is no Fedora 8 package available! But there are openSUSE RPMs. Now you let me install that openSUSE RPM on my Fedora via a $whatever API and/or $foobar KIT, and you helped me make install a “third party software” on my Fedora.

Got the idea now?

Sean Middleditch, Athrun and Denis Washington are spot-on. It still surprises me why, despite these stories, there are still people who don’t recognize the problem.

Don’t want to sound harsh, but I’m afraid that it’s you that forgot to ask what customers want. Compare these:

http://www.skype.org/intl/en/download/skype/windows/
http://www.skype.org/intl/en/download/skype/macosx/
http://www.skype.org/intl/en/download/skype/linux/

Click on the “Download now” button and imagine how easily fresh users of Windows, Mac and, say, Fedora Core 9 would install Skype. Windows and Mac guys won’t need to know what versions of Windows or OS X they own (as long as the system meets the minimum requirements). Linux users are out of luck. Do you have Fedora 9? Oops, there are only 6 and 7. Maybe the version for 7 will do. Or then again maybe not. Is Ubuntu 7+ ok for Kubuntu 8.04? Average user doesn’t know and *doesn’t have* to know these things. On other system they click and go, on Linux they have to either hope that someone put a recent version on the repositories or they’re scre*ed…

If things don’t change, no matter how shiny Linux GUIs may become, or how powerful the whole system may be, average users will be cut off. You have to be a geek or have someone to babysit you in everything more advanced than turning the machine on and off… and this doesn’t help Linux adoption at all.

My two cents…

Also because we want to be able to provide users with the latest version of AbiWord (anyone remember ubuntu refusing to include AbiWord 2.6 in the last release, even through we provided all the work (the .debs)?).

We tried autopackage. It’s a nightmare to maintain and have working on all systems. That’s why we dropped it for 2.6.

Now, to the blog post itself.

“This “give packaging power to users thing” has been tried before a few times before and fallen on it’s face each time. There’s a reason that PackageKit uses the distro supplied packages, rather than trying to define it’s own package and metadata format.”

I don’t believe that this is a reason to not try again. In fact, when I learned about PackageKit, I was actually a bit disappointed about that fact that it just provides an interface for the already-existing software management facilities (apt etc) and didn’t try to get to the (IMHO) “real” problem: third-party software installation. Even if there were some failures when attempting to fix the situation, I really believe it can be done, and we should try our best to get it done, not resignate before even getting started.

About the just-the-coolest-tech argument: I didn’t choose D-Bus and PolicyKit because they are the latest and greatest – I chose them because they just do what I need. D-Bus allows the definition of an language-neutral API, and PolicyKit is just great to implement the least-privilege principle, which is crucial for installing third-party software (the installer should just be able to do what it needs to do, not run as root). None of these technologies are used for the sake of using them.

Note that, while the system daemon uses all these technologies, installers using the API would only have to use a small C library with a small handful of functions. So most of the architecture is abstracted away.

There’s cleary a need for an _universal_ third party application package format for Linux systems.
Right now, if you’re an ISV and want to target Linux systems (not even 1.5% of the market) you will want to make (at least) packages for Enterprise distros, SLED/SLES/RHEL and for the most popular community distros: Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora.
It’s cleary easy to see why Linux is failing on the desktop…

Right now, distros are pretty much reduced to packaging every applications out there (a noble but impossible goal) instead of being able to innovate where it matters: integration.

Fact is: it is not easy to support a variety of Linux distros by a simple package. It never will be.

Let me just add that this is actually, and sadly, why Wine is the most important project ever and if one project should have all the resources (to fix bug #1 or whatever reason), Wine is it: not because of future games, which should (at some point) start to come out for Linux native. We all want that to happen, and hope it will.

It’s for all those thousands, millions of games that are already out there, will never be ported and actually are important enough to keep Windows around for many of us. These games are many, oh so very many.

This is for the same reason why MAME, ScummVM and all the other game system emulators are so popular – Windows games are not programs other than in the most technical respect. They are actually documents locked in a proprietary format – the Win32 API with DirectX and what have you. Treating games just like any other application is a fallacy at best. If you create a really good Gimp or Krita, you have a replacement for Photoshop – bitmap manipulation solved. OpenOffice can take on MS Office – documents solved.

But if you create one good Counterstrike clone, you might have replaced Counterstrike. And chances are, you haven’t.

/offtopic rant done, for this time. It just fit in with how enormously important games are for a huge part of the computer using community, and it’s only getting bigger.