| Accept |
___________________________________________________________

You select either buy or test. The "warning after 7 days" line only applies to Test and will not appear if you select Buy. The brackets are an input field where you can write the value you prefer, 7 is the default.


3a) If you select Buy
The payment process will start. This can be done either by taking you to the developer's page, by taking you to an Ubuntu website where payments to every developer are centralized, or from Add/Remove itself. I guess it will depend on where users feel more comfortable writing their credit card number.


3b) If you select Test
The software will install normally, with no more questions.


4) Warning
7 days after installing the software for testing, the following popup appears:
______________________________________
You have tested "Time Waster" for 7 days
What do you want to do?
| Buy | | Keep | | Remove |
______________________________________

This popup can appear either 7 days after installation, or the first time you launch the application after 7 days have passed.
The buy button would take you to the payment process. Keep would just keep the software in your computer without paying, and remove would uninstall it. This would be the first and last warning ever about this.


For closed source paid apps, the Test option would not be available.

With this setup, users would download MojoSetup files (or install from CDs, etc) just like a normal file, in the regular way -- no need for a centralized repository. On Ubuntu, the system would associate the installer with a standard mime-type or extension, so that the installer could (optionally) automatically start in Ubuntu's version of the installer when the download is complete, avoiding the whole chmod +x circus, providing the end user with a smooth installation experience =)

Of course, such MojoSetup installers would still be self-contained, so they'd still work fine on non-Ubuntu systems, like they do now. Developers would have just one package to maintain, and in fact wouldn't even have to be aware of Ubuntu's special handling for it to work (though it couldn't hurt either).

There's a few problems with this too, though. First of all, as I mentioned, MojoSetup is not yet complete, and currently lacks some features like eg a standard way of installing desktop menu entries (though support for this is planned). Also, relying on a mime-type for MojoSetup installer detection can be unreliable since developers might not have control over the web-server providing their downloads (commercial software may be hosted by the payment processor!), and there's not really a standard extension for MojoSetup installers currently (.mojosetup has been proposed, but this is very long .. personally I've used .mojo.run or just .run (also used by Loki/makeself). I've also seen .bin, or even .sh (which is familiar for Loki users but very misleading since MojoSetup installers are not shell scripts)). They could perhaps be identified by looking for executables with zip files concatenated and see if there's a MojoSetup style config file inside, but a standardized filename extension would probably be better.. Also, since MojoSetup installers are real executables, marking an installer executable and running it on an Ubuntu system would still run the actual executable in stead of Ubuntu's version -- this could be fixed by having the embedded MojoSetup executable check for the presence of an overriding executable (MojoSetup already has support for alternate executables, currently used eg for running a 64-bit installer from a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit system, so this may in fact already be supported).

(Disclaimer: I've no real association with MojoSetup, except I really like it and have used it for installers for some commercial games. I've also contributed some small patches now and then. If this solution is chosen, I'd definitely recommend cooperating with the creator of MojoSetup, Ryan Gordon. He can be reached via the link above.)