Robert McQueen, CEO of the GNOME Foundation, has published a roadmap for developing Flathub, a catalog and repository of self-contained Flatpak packages. Flathub is positioned as a vendor-independent platform for building applications and distributing them directly to end users. It is noted that there are currently about 2000 applications in the Flathub catalog, with more than 1500 contributors involved in maintaining them. Approximately 700 app downloads are recorded daily and approximately 900 million requests to the site are processed.
The key tasks for the further development of the project are the evolution of Flathub from an assembly service to an application store catalog, 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 participants and financing 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 to the promotion and development of the Linux desktop is the economic factor, and the introduction of a system of donations and application sales will stimulate the development of the ecosystem.
The plans also mention the creation of a separate independent organization to support and legally support Flathub. Currently, the project is overseen by the GNOME Foundation, but continued work under its wing is recognized as leading to additional risks arising in application delivery services. Also, the development funding services that are 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 will include representatives from GNOME, KDE, and members from the community.
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 $100 to Flathub development from Endless Network, and it is expected that the total amount funding for 2023 will amount to 250 thousand dollars, which will allow supporting two developers in full-time mode.
Some of the work done or currently under way is testing the redesign of the Flathub site, implementing a split access and verification system to verify that apps are downloaded directly by their developers, separating accounts for users and developers, a labeling system to identify verified and free apps, handling donations. and payments through the Stripe financial service, a system for paying users to access paid downloads, providing the ability to directly download and sell applications only to verified developers who have access to the main repositories (will allow you to isolate yourself from third parties that have nothing to do with development, but are trying to cash in on sales builds of popular open source programs).
Source: opennet.ru