The App Store that Apple introduced in 2008 for its then known as iPhone OS (today iOS) demonstrated that application stores are important to any operating system. The elementary OS is called AppCenter and Daniel Foré and his team have started a campaign of crowfunding on Indiegogo to improve its "software center" in a way that is not entirely clear.
La campaign, which at the time of this writing has already achieved 70% of what they need, intends to raise funds to physically bring together the main elementary OS developers for a week to, they say, create AppCenter, their app store. Here the first question arises: Create AppCenter? Hasn't a software center with the same name been available in elementary OS for a long time?
AppCenter, the non-new elementary OS app store
Based on what we understand by Foré's words, AppCenter will propose a new software distribution model which will make things easier for developers while providing an affordable payment system for any pocket:
With AppCenter we want to allow independent developers to easily create and distribute native and open source applications for elementary OS. But we also want to make sure that there is a clear, fair and ethical business model that allows people to create and enjoy great applications.
At first, we can understand that what Foré plans is to add to its AppCenter the possibility that users pay what I would define as "will", that is, it would use the "pay what you want" model of the independent gaming portal Humble Bundle.
The idea seems to be catching on on Indiegogo, but it remains to be seen if developers can make a profit this way. Would you pay to use software that we can get for free by other means?