A small gain of people using it is still something. There is two apps that I use that are found on Microsoft Store. Netflix and Xodo. Xodo is actually pretty much like a free version of Adobe Acrobat DC (Look it up, and enjoy), and does exactly what I need
in Adobe Acrobat DC as a future product designer. As someone said, I think there was some misunderstandings thanks to Martin Owens and my CFS and the aftermath, and I don't think the original guy who sent us the e-mail suggests we must put a price tag. So,
I think we need to put into a vote, and send him a formal e-mail after we made our decision.
The way I see it, we should basically answer ourselves one question: Do we gain anything from offering Inkscape in the Windows store that would make it worth our while?
As Mc I'm strongly opposed to putting any price tag on Inkscape. Doing so would be the right approach if we wanted to handicap/penalize the Windows store on purpose (I know this from a few open source applications available from Google store for a fee while they're for free otherwise), but in that case I wouldn't bother putting Inkscape into the Windows store to start with.
- Personally I dislike everything App-related and although I use Windows 10 I've removed all apps and never use Windows store. From my point of view "apps" (and especially app stores) are one of the most stupid inventions of the 21st century, developed by people under the pretense of improved security and ease of use, but in the end mostly being a way to create a unified route for monetization where Microsoft/Google/whoever can get a piece of the cake on-the-fly while controlling which apps are made available in the first place, so I'd boycott it unless it would cause the project serious disadvantages (and I doubt it very much that this would be the case). But that's only my opinion...
- From the Inkscape project's point of view I believe visibility is one of the biggest potential gains:
People who otherwise might not stumble over Inkscape might do so if it was available on the Windows store.
My question here would be: Does anybody believe this would be a considerable amount of users? As I said before I don't use the Windows store and I also don't know any people who do. As a result I actually doubt there would be a reasonable gain involved... But I might be wrong: Do others have a different impression? Is there any indication that whatever Microsoft has planned might change the situation in the near future? From the outreach it seems at least as if they were (desperately?) trying to make the Windows store more popular.
- Apart from that I don't see many advantages (quite the opposite):
- It would be yet another package that has to be maintained.
- As far as I can see It would create installations incompatible to standalone installations as Windows apps seem to be designed as being self-contained without direct access to the file system.
- The whole Windows Desktop Bridge adds yet another emulation layer, which obviously might influence performance but more importantly could cause new bugs that would need a lot of effort to debug and we're already behind on Windows specific bugs as it is.
Donations are obviously fine, but I don't think that such a discussion would be specific to the Windows store.
Regards,
Eduard
P.S. (Off topic but I have to mention it - maybe worth a second thread, though):
To all of you who seem to have dollars in your eyes: Does anybody of you have the impression that the speed of Inkscape's development is currently limited by money? Is any of the active developers paid? Would any of the active developers would want to be paid in order to invest more (spare) time into Inkscape? Where should this time come from? I honestly don't have the impression we have a reasonable idea on how to invest any potential money/donations that would be earned/raised in order to actually benefit feature development. (The one thing I see where money really is advantageous are hackfests. But then again one was just canceled because of lack of interest/time and I doubt money would have change much about that...)
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