Microsoft Store Bans Paid Apps With Third-Party Open Source Software – Computer – News

If you ask for money for your application, then you are an entrepreneur and I can expect that you can bring some research and insight yourself.

10.8.7

Not attempt to profit from open-source or other software that is otherwise generally available for free, nor be priced irrationally high relative to the features and functionality provided by your product.

Is your whole to get a product for free? No… Does your entire product consist of open source content/libraries? Yes… Is this a unique assembly of open source products (new product on open source software)?

There are no hard truths in this, as in many of the other items. This purely gives MS the option to throw your app out of their store if they don’t like it. How does MS determine what, for example, is irrationally high priced? A $0.99 version of Thunderbird is unacceptable, while Outlook sells for $159.99.

MS is really not the only one with rules, changing rules and unclear rules that a random (small) developer can screw up. Hence always have more options, do not have a single point of failure, etc. These online app stores are still much better for developers than the situation before the app stores (pre 2008)…

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