Analysis of PortableApps.com

It comes up every-so-often in my community why anyone would do anything but start and end in the the great PortableApps.com project.  I decided to put some notes together why you'd want to go a different route.  As always, I had to add some positive notes as well.

Why avoid PortableApps.com:

• Arguably a waste of disk and processor space, especially if the program is already natively portable
• Lots of people dislike the start screen, which can only be disabled via the launcher or an annoying INI edit/move action.
• Some programs never get out of "development" status for unknown reasons; governmental system for program addition is unclear to me.
• Avoids dotNET-based programs - depending on who you talk to, this is either good or bad, but it for example cuts you off from most of the really good screen capture tools.
• I strongly prefer the non-PA versions of Ditto and CubicExplorer, which I've only had problems with.  Note that these are in the minority as I've been using many other PA programs successfully for years.
• Seems to rely on one individual for it's success (Haller).  If something were to happen to him, it's unclear if the project would continue.  This is a common concern with many open source projects.
• I find the non-standard forum system they use difficult to read.
  

Why go with PortableApps:

• Ease of updating (this is far and away my favorite part)
  
• They have a thorough testing foundation that includes multiple operating systems, whereas we mostly seem to use Win7.
• Seems to have solid relationships with big companies Oracle and Mozilla to help make jPortable and Portable Firefox happen.
• Generally more stealth and often help make directories relative rather than static (.\Music rather than C:\Music).
• Very pro-open source and make a big deal out of license compliance
  
• Get programs in front of anti-virus services and help fight the false-positive issue, which we're constantly addressing.
• Has been able to enforce a freeware status on a lot of programs that have gone the adware/bundleware route.
• App Store approach is what people are familiar with now, drawing people toward freeware and open source options.
• Very fast, reliable servers unlike any number of distributed freeware options which regularly break.