I wouldn’t trust Google with that role because their incentives are not properly aligned with my goals as a user, and they don’t have any track record of performing that function.

Google has a similar problem like many proprietary software makers wrt their Linux offers: getting the software out there in a way that does not make the users suffer. They could go to distributions directly, but in Google’s case, that would almost certainly be a failure, given that the Picasa EULA requires distributors to do some rather outlandish things, like having to bind their organizations to Google’s EULA, or mandating that a single copy (+ one backup copy) of the software exists, which makes mirroring of the distribution pointless, etc. The proprietary distribution model with a single, controlled point of distribution, and the Linux distribution model with many autonomous points of distribution, don’t play well with each other, and licenses that try to enforce the former model can’t really fit into the later.

One major problem with the routing around the distributions in order to preserve restrictive licensing is that one’s own packages can’t rely on the distributions caring about them (because they don’t know they exist), i.e. in the long run stuff breaks, because the underlying package dependencies change, and then users suffer from a bad upgrade/installation experience, quite unlike magic. The external proprietary software repositories for Fedora, for example, have long suffered from such ‘platform drift’ effects.

The LSB is supposed to make that problem go away for ISVs, I guess. I have no idea how well it does, as I’ve never heard of an LSB-compliant package being advertised as such. So I guess it’s not being marketed to me, as an end user.

On the other hand, the Linux channel is the only channel where ISVs can ‘make a deal’ with the channel operators, and try to establish their products as part of the ‘magic’ out-of-the-box experience of the platform. Neither Microsoft nor Apple are really interested in that. Cutting themselves free from the necessity to cooperate with distributions can be an initially appealing proposition, but in general that also means being cut off from the user support channels that distributions offer, and requires an investment in one’s own infrastructure.

Whether that makes sense is a matter of the community & branding strategy, I guess.