Creating A Linux Application Market

A few thoughts on the Linux Application Market that I thought I would put together and perhaps a point of discussion for people on LinkedIn from the perspective of a core member of the GNOME Project and a former Director of the GNOME Foundation.

Today, Linux comprises a 1-2% share of the desktop market, at least last measured by NetMarketShare last month.  This is only a best guess because it is very difficult to measure the size of the Linux application market: delivery of applications is not controlled by their vendors, but by Linux distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE.  Instead, measurement is done by user agent on browsers, search engine analytics and other indirect forms of measurement. 

What is missing is how many downloads did a popular software product like LibreOffice have for Linux?  There's no way to know because the distribution of the LibreOffice software is handled by many different distributions.  Even large projects like Firefox, which offer Windows and OS X versions for download, only have their Linux version as a tar archive, or maybe as a deb or rpm package that one might have to manually install.  In most cases, open source projects will simply encourage users to install it from their Linux distributor.

There is a direct correlation between a software vendor and its users that we cannot measure.  In fact, doesn't it seems odd that an operating system vendor is also the applications provider?  No other operating system has a system like this, discounting the app store model.  This situation evolved because operating system vendors (OSVs) also became in charge of the user experience as there were a lot of moving parts that required a dedicated set of teams focusing on creating a uniform experience.  Ubuntu is a great example of this.  Some people claim that this is still the right way to go.

What has changed is that the quality, stability, and user experience of Linux-based desktop projects have increased to the point that distributions have outlived their usefulness as a general provider of applications.  In order to evolve further, we will need to put application distributions back on the heads of software developers and start simplifying the application eco-system by working with developers and operating system "plumbers" to improve the entirety of the Linux platform.

Once it's possible to measure the market, prospective software companies can determine what kind of investment they want to make in building a Linux-compatible application or even a browser-based application.  Even more importantly, can money be made? Free Software and Open Source developers should be given the opportunity to ask their users for some method of compensation for creating and supporting the software that users enjoy.  The same can be said of commercial application vendors.

There are trade-offs as well with this new model.  Distributions provide a lot of value to developers.  For instance, distributions respond much faster to CVEs than an average hobbyist developer.  Some developers may prefer that a distribution takes on a lot of the work of maintenance, trading control over shipping the application for it.  That said, nothing stops them from posting their own applications directly from their own website if they wanted, and still have distributions distribute their apps.  In contrast, larger developers can package and test their applications exactly as they intended, and distribute them with the same method they use for other supported platforms.

So to wit, the Year of the Linux Desktop, the perennial joke of the Free and Open Source Community, could be a reality once we are able to fix the distribution of applications, and application developers are convinced there is a market for them that will generate wealth.

To that end, I've envisioned something to move this idea forward, and after working on it for a couple of years, I am finally making it a reality: a conference where we can focus on these issues and provide the kind of collaboration and activism needed to make this a reality, and improve the application story by providing strong collaboration between OS "plumbers", application developers, and desktop projects. 

Libre Application Summit hosted by GNOME is a vehicle for the leadership within the community to move this forward.  We have a number of converging technologies and ideas that makes this exactly the right time for this conference. 

Linux has made the operating system an off-the-shelf component beholden to no single company.  We can do the same for the desktop, creating many rich variations and high quality desktop technologies for entrepreneurs to build on.

I hope to make more posts to talk about various aspects of the Linux desktop and specifically the project I represent, GNOME, and what we are doing.