"We absolutely want to support developers distributing successfully OSS apps. In fact there are already fantastic OSS apps in the Store! The goal of this policy is to protect customers from misleading listings. Thanks for feedback, we will review to make sure the intent is clear"
I wonder why they don't just take down the junk apps for violating trademarks and copyright licenses and add mechanisms to prevent those junk apps from reappearing, like blocking all "Inkscape" apps except the one from account of the trademark holder.
Another concern mentioned in the threads was having a different price between the app store and other ways to get the app, to fix that they should have simply required developers to refer to those other ways from the app store itself, or allowed developers to set an app as pay-what-you-want plus the Microsoft cut, or both.
They're just trying to prevent third parties from charging for ripped off open source apps (which is becoming a common problem) but they phrased it very poorly
Are they ripped off, though? Assuming the name/logo have changed, repackaging and redistributing code and binaries is exactly what many open source licenses permit you to do.
I can understand the sentiment, but if someone takes an open source project not in the store, sets up the necessary signatures/does the necessary payments and provides an auto-updating version of a popular tool, I can only applaud that. Many open source developers don't want to invest the time into that, or they have other reasons to not want to deal with the MS store, which is perfectly acceptable; however, for the users, this means they have to go to alternative sources if they want to get their software from one single place.
I'd much rather get GIMP and friends from the MS Store than deal with downloading and executing .exes from all kinds of different websites and then having to manually check for updates every time. Microsoft should really just provide a free license to open source developers IMO to populate their store with some common applications that people actually want.
While I get your sentiment, most are f****** lazy though and are literally posting minimally-changed (only to be able to pack it into Windows Store). I am frustrated at the wording of the restriction and generally for Microsoft's bewildering literal-worse-than-Apple moderation but let's be honest here: too many apps are being lazily ripped off.
https://twitter.com/gisardo/status/1544728548241448960