Flathub is home to hundreds of applications that can be easily installed on any Linux distribution.
Few days ago, robert mcqueen, CEO of the GNOME Foundation unveiled the publication of a roadmap for the development of Flathub, as well as a self-contained Flatpak catalog and repository.
For those of you who are new to Flathub, you should know that Flathub is positioned as a vendor-agnostic platform for building apps and distributing them directly to end users.
It's been quite a few months since the most recent updates to Flathub last year. We've been busy behind the scenes, so I'd like to share what we've been up to at Flathub and why, and what's in store for us this year. I want to focus on:
Where Flathub stands today as a strong ecosystem with 2000 apps
Our progress in evolving Flathub from a build service to an app store
The economic barrier to growing the ecosystem and its consequences
What's next to overcome our challenges with focused initiatives
It should be noted that there are currently around 2000 apps in the Flathub catalog, with more than 1500 contributors involved in maintaining them. Approximately 700 application downloads are recorded each day and approximately 000 million requests to the site are processed.
The key development tasks later of the project are the evolution of Flathub from a build service to a catalog application store, which forms an ecosystem for distributing Linux applications that takes into account the interests of various participants and projects.
Much attention is paid to the issues of increasing the motivation of the participants and the financing of the projects published in the catalog, for which it is planned to implement systems for collecting donations, selling applications and organizing paid subscriptions (permanent donations). .
According to Robert McQueen, the biggest obstacle for the promotion and development of the Linux desktop is the economic factor and the introduction of a system of donations and sale of applications will stimulate the development of the ecosystem.
The plans they also mention the creation of an independent organization separate to legally support and support Flathub.
Currently, the project is overseen by the GNOME Foundation, but it is recognized that continued work under their wing creates additional risks that arise in application delivery services. Also, the development funding services being created for Flathub are not compatible with the non-commercial status of the GNOME Foundation.
The new organization intends to use a management model with transparent decision making. The Governing Board It will include representatives from GNOME, KDE, and community members.
I'm also heartened to see that many of our operating system vendor partners have recognized that this model is hugely complementary and adds to the essential work they're doing to bring the Linux desktop to end users, and that "having more applications available to their users » is a value-add, allowing you to focus on your core offering and not a zero-sum game that should fuel infighting.
In addition to the head of the GNOME Foundation, Neil McGovern, former Debian project leader, and Aleix Pol, president of the KDE eV organization, have contributed with $100 to Endless Network's Flathub development, and the amount is expected to
Some of the work done or in progress is to test the redesign of the Flathub site, implement a segregation and verification system to confirm that applications are downloaded directly by their developers, separate accounts for users and developers, a labeling system to identify verified.
In addition to that, also it is planned to include a processing of donations and payments through the Stripe financial service, a system for paying users for access to paid downloads, providing the ability to download and sell applications directly only to verified developers who have access to the main repositories (it will allow you to isolate yourself from third parties who have nothing to do with development, but are trying to cash in on sales of builds of popular open source programs).
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.