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?
- 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.
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.
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...)