There’s a lot to unpack here but some topics can be extracted;
- Isolation
- maintainers (or curation)
- well maintained software
I’ll try and address each topic but let me tackle curation first. I’m using the word here to talk about “curating” software, that is to take care of something. Wikipedia defines it as “A curator (from Latin: cura, meaning “to take care”)[1] is a manager or overseer” and this is what I mean when I use the word “curation”. Purism has every intention of overseeing the apps in our app store in the same manner that we oversee the packages in PureOS. Free Software is a hard requirement which means we’ll have access to the source code of any app so we can see what it is doing. We’ll also extend our oversight beyond just software license. You can read a high-level explanation of our goals here: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-announces-pureos-store/
How does flatpak fit in with our goals? flatpak offers the advantages of an emerging standard that provides greater isolation and portability and is not controlled by one entity or vendor. For Purism flatpak will not enable proprietary apps because that doesn’t match our policy. Perhaps somewhere else there will be proprietary flatpaks, but not in our store because we intend to maintain it in such a manner that only free software gets in.
So hopefully you can see that 1. the choice of flatpak will not enable proprietary apps 2. our use of flatpak will be carefully overseen and help keep software up-to-date, just as we try to do in PureOS.