Open Source on the App Store
I was going to write a short piece on how the App Store opened up interesting new opportunities for developers to sell open source software because of the relative difficulty in sideloading applications on an iOS device, but then the draft lingered in my WordPress backend for more than two months. Since then Rob Rhyne, whose Briefs prototyping framework served as an inspiration for my unwritten piece, has beaten me to the punch and written about the topic of selling open source on the app store much more conclusively than i would have:
A lot has been said about Apple’s walled garden but since they control distribution, a majority of the market can’t install an app from source. That sucks if you’re a user, but fortunate if you’re a developer that wants to open-source your application.
Most assume you can’t sell open-source software because no one would pay money for something they can install for free. Free software is practically synonymous with liberty and no cost. When the App store, the equation changed. Interested parties now have the liberty to examine or modify (and re-install if you pay Apple) an application while developers charge a fair price for their applications. Freedom for users, beer money for developers.
Needless to say, I’m excited about the prospect of the new model. Imagine how powerful this would be for budding developers? What if you could look under the covers of your favorite apps? What could you learn?
I don’t really have much to add, except for two more examples where developers are taking this new distribution approach:
First there’s Battle for Wesnoth, a popular multi-platform open source strategy game. Before the iPhone port, it was already quite successful on other platforms where it is free. The developer community ported the game to iOS to make a little extra money for funding further development (and from what i’ve read it’s doing very well), but the source code is also publicly available.
The other example is Noticings. Its developer, Tom Taylor, recently shared some interesting information on how his app, a rather niche app priced at £1.79, is doing on the app store and he open sourced the code and put it on GitHub, for anyone to learn and build themselves.
If you know any other examples for this open source software distribution approach i would be thankful for any pointers: @chriwim on Twitter.
