andy sellers

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8 years, 10 months ago.

Why isn't mbed going the app store route ?

How can we improve the MBED ? well, more libraries, more complex libraries(some even from academia) and higher code quality and good unit-testing would be great.

So how to make those happen ?

Well , maybe we should copy the most successful software creation platform ever , i.e. the App store ? By enabling people to buy and sell libraries(even closed source one[1], with good protection) , under a variety of business models[2] enforced automatically(no lawyers !!) and with the marketing mechanisms available in stores, which can motivate a lot of talent.

And it wouldn't kill the open-source model - there are still other incentives for people to release open-source code.

So why isn't MBED going that route ?

[1]For example closed source libraries, with open-source unit-tests are nice.

[2]For example selling a library for 50cents/100 units and 3 cents/100K units just by setting this in the store.

And how would you automatically enforce a per unit license fee? Last time I checked it's hard for a web site to track how many times I copy a file from my HDD to a USB device.

posted by Andy A 03 Jul 2015

1 Answer

Jan Jongboom
8 years, 10 months ago.

I think your proposed solution would do more harm than good for the mbed platform. In the past the Microsoft centered dev world worked exactly like this: all components were paid and timebombed, plus closed source and obfuscated. This has hurt their developer community a lot over the years: very bad component quality, and no way of fixing bugs in abandoned projects. If we've learned anything from the rise (in web dev community) of projects like Rails and node.js/npm is that a thriving developer ecosystem needs an open-source model behind their libraries. Where's the incentive for project authors to create libraries that make the platform a better place (through f.e. integrations, making themselves swappable, or supporting protocols from competitors) when it'll hurt their revenues, because it'd be way better to sell a full component suite over small flexible and replace components.

That's not to say there's things to be learned from app stores. I think discoverablity of the best library for your project is a problem to be solved by mbed, but we might be better off looking at https://rubygems.org/ and http://npmjs.com/.

Accepted Answer

You raise very good points, and discovery is important .

But maybe a kickstarter like model will work ? where discussion on what kind of interfaces/protocols etc should apply to the product, and that the product should be released as open source(or maybe for 1/2-1 year as closed source to benefit backers, buyers and than open it to everybody) ?

posted by andy sellers 03 Jul 2015

Another direction, you could produce some useful Android apps and back them up with good libraries on Mbed where users can produce their own code to suit their needs. Its all about IOT and BLE and the last time I looked there wasn't any apps available for Mbed. Most apps are free with a small charge to get rid of the advertising or pro version.

posted by Paul Staron 03 Jul 2015

The ideal way to solve the android/ios problem is to someone write something like the simblee, but for mbed:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/02/new-chip-lets-gadget-developers-build-mobile-apps-into-their-devices/

But since it would takes a lot of work, where would the incentives come from ?

posted by andy sellers 04 Jul 2015