Open core?

It will be interesting to see what happens when an app store selling "commercial" (i.e. proprietary) software appears within future versions of Ubuntu. I'm not really ideologically opposed to proprietary software - I've written plenty of it in the past - but closed source methodology has various pragmatic disadvantages and typically a low bus factor.

There has been proprietary software in Ubuntu for years, in the form of various drivers and codecs, but so far no explicit closed source applications are installed by default or are overtly advertised as far as I'm aware (unless Ubuntu One counts). One possible problem if big name software companies show up to display their warez within the app store is that the OS could begin to suffer from the same issues as occur with "open core" systems - assuming that Canonical takes a cut from each app downloaded from the store, as Apple do with theirs. That is, it could be considered financially advantageous to ship low quality or broken default free applications with the distro, in order to make the purchasable proprietary equivalents a more enticing choice. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might contend that's why they ditched the Gimp if they believed that a version of Photoshop might feature in a future app store, but this would of course be a completely scurrilous speculation.

Also, merely prominently displaying proprietary apps in front of the free software within the store could itself be contentious. In my crystal ball I can foresee much wailing, flame wars and gnashing of YouTube videos if the introduction of an app store isn't managed with due care.

Probably the path of least resistance would be to stick to proprietary games within the store, at least initially. Although there are open source games - some of them quite good - for the most part people don't expect to have the four freedoms with respect to games, which can be considered to be more artworks than utilitarian by nature.