Windows has existed for most of lifetime without a store or even central package management but it was still the biggest platform for commercial software. And recently the App and Play stores seem to cause more trouble to many companies than it's worth.
If they used the royalties to hire people to audit the packages I might even consider paying for free software, but I'm afraid it will turn into walled gardens where small developers have no say and the big ones just deal with the problems because it's the only option.
I hope it turns out to be better with KDE and Gnome that come from a FOSS background but money makes people greedy.
