Im not too sure as I don't work for Canonical. However, from an external perspective having worked with bzr and launchpad, I wouldn't be surprised if there is a bunch of aspects there that would make opensourcing a nightmare.
Things like potentially giving some mechanism that could enable a user to sign/publish on behalf of Canonical snaps/packages for example. That kind of thing would probably need to be removed. Deep integration between CI/operational infrastructure for things like building images. I can imagine after Canonical's experience of launchpad that they probably did hardcode aspects and it isn't some modular thing you can just spin up on docker.
>And this, is the killer. This is exactly what the people at Linux Mint do not want. This is why F-Droid exists on Android. Yes, free software can be distributed on the snap store or on Google Play, but ultimately these are proprietary platforms controlled by one corporate entity whose interests may not be aligned with those of the community. Users of community Linux distros demand choice in where they obtain software.
Snaps I checked aren't there to replace apt. They don't prevent the install of flatpak, appimages or any alternative. Canonical has no agreement that prevents parties like Mozilla/KDE from only publishing on the snap store.
>Malware has already been successfully pushed to the Snap Store. We now trust software because it came from a store that removes well known malware.
There was one case of a snap bundled with a cryptominer. That was settled within 3 days and addressed to the community in a blog. Since then, it has been deliberately looked for. As someone who has published on the snap store, yes there are some checks present to ensure malicious software isn't being pushed.
>The idea of "trust" here is also antithetical to open-source and software freedom. Rather than trusting software because it has verifiable source code,
It is really easy for me to see exactly what is being run/executed on the snaps that I install. In fact I have built/used snaps successfully without even the snap store all together.
