Free Software on Android

[Nadav Har'El]

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote about "Re: Free Software on Android":
> Well, note http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html - I think we shouldn't
> discourage Android FOSS developers from trying to sell their applications (as
> long as they also provide the source, which means that other people can make

The "problem" is that Free Software doesn't just require providing the
source - it also requires that the people who get the source may redistribute
the program or modified versions of it. This means that if you have an
ad-supported app and publish its source code as free software (GPL, BSD
license, or whatever), someone can - legally and morally - remove the
ad showing code and also publish it on the market. Or worse - he can
leave the ads and publish it on the market, making the ad money himself!

So while it is theoretically possible to try to sell free software on
the Android market, I don't see how this business model can be
sustained.

I noticed two approaches to try to solve this problem:

The first approach is to have a free and ad-less app, but in addition
have in the market a "app + donation" variant which costs money. The
free app tells you in its "About" has a link to the donation version in the
market, encouraging you to buy it if you want to give money to the
developers. I like this approach, but I don't know how many people will
actually pay. On one app I actually used, the free version has 1000-5000
installs, while the $1 donation version had 1-5 (!) installations.

The second approach is one taken by the "OSMAnd" (OpenStreetMap for
Android) project. It's free software, but they only published an old
version for free on the market, and a newer version for a fee. They do
have a new free version on their site, but it's not on the convenient
Google market so most laypeople will end up paying to get the new version.
The question is, what prevents someone else, legally or morally, from
uploading the most recent OSMAnd, or a fork thereof, to the Android market.
For now, this hasn't happened, but I don't see how they can guarantee
this in the future.

> and much more other open source apps. Some shareware or otherwise commercial
> text editors appear to be doing pretty well so far, but they face an increasing
> amount of competition from open-source text editors. 

Really? When was the last time you saw a commercial text editor??
I haven't seen one in years, possibly decades :-) But we are digressing.

> I'm sure your code is in better condition than most of the code that beginning
> programmers (and sometimes experienced ones) that I regularly review on
> Freenode channels. I'm never ashamed to make my code viewable, and I've even
> posted some code I've written in high school:

I agree - when I started understanding the example widget I started
with, I realized that half of the code there was redundant crap.
I guess the guy who wrote that widget also copied half of the code from
other people's code, and also didn't understand very well what he was doing :-)

In any case, when I'm pleased enough with the silly widget I wrote, I'll
find a way to publish it. On F-Droid? On the Android market (I'll need
to shell out $25 to Google for that)? On my website? I'll have to figure
out.

If you're curious, my silly 50-line widget toggles WiFi on and off, which I
need to conserve battery and avoid annoying hyperlinking ads when my children
play on the device. If you want to complain that, "hey, there are already 10
free apps for doing that", well, 1. You're right, but that's why I
started with such a simple task, and 2. Mine is better ;-) and 3. All
but one of these 10 aren't free software (open source), and the free one
was the widget I started with to develop my improved version.

Nadav.

P.S. It hurts me (and probably hurts Stallman even more) that when searching
for Android software, the keywords "free software" is useless, and I find
myself searching for "open source" :(

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                 Wednesday, Dec 28 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Ms Piggy's last words: "I'm pink,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |therefore I'm ham."