In the past I thought Ubuntu's intention was to level the playing field, allowing beginners from any economic background access to the best free software.
If the right is removed to modify and redistribute (to other distros), because of appstore lock in, then it wouldn't be free. My argument is that only the economically privleged will have access to certain software on an OS that was constructed around the intention to provide equal access to everyone.
The free software isn't going away and never will, and what we developers provide as the core system will always be free. Making it possible or easy for users to also install additional proprietary software doesn't change that.
So you are a dev right? Always wanted to ask this, what are the problems with price discrimination. As in lowering the prices if someone from developing countries is purchasing the product. I mean the tech problems.
The technical problem for price discrimination based on the user's location is that location can be faked. The social problem is that, even if you succeed, users who are paying more will feel ripped off.
I think a better approach is to allow users to pay what they want (maybe with a specified minimum). If it's pitched the right way, some users will happily pay more than you'd charge them, but you're still letting poor (or stingy) users get your software, and (as a side benefit) those users may also recommend your product to others. So the net profit could be greater than if you charged a fixed price.
Funny you ask this, as I'm probably the only Ubuntu dev with an economics degree rather than a computer science one.
Regardless, from a technical perspective, we don't really collect enough data about users to know who would be willing to pay more, and that sort of data is a minimum requirement for price discrimination of any kind. We have some pretty firm policies about not collecting personal data unless we absolutely have to, so I don't expect this to change either.
You could make a few guesses though, and for instance charge different amounts in different currencies or countries. You could also do what traditional retailers do, and provide coupons of various sorts in particular venues. We're not technically ready for anything like that yet though.
Pragmatically, I don't think it's a rabbit hole we'd want to go down even if it were no different than what existing publishers are doing anyway.
This is true. The rest of your argument seems to operate on a wrong definition of what free software is: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html