[autonomo.us] Web app stores

[Christopher Allan Webber]

I think I tried sending this email about 2 months ago or so but the list
was down.  I still think it's worth conversing about, even if my initial
email here is still not the best. :)

~~ original email follows ~~

Hello autonomo.us!  It's been almost a year since this mailing list was
active...

I've been planning on starting a thread on this for about 5 months, but
have never had the time to write up a good one, so here's a bad, rushed
start to what will hopefully be a good thread, before I forget for
another 5 months.

Both Google and Mozilla are talking about / moving forward with "web app
stores":
 - https://chrome.google.com/webstore
 - https://apps.mozillalabs.com/

To be quite honest and frank, I don't know much about this, I can't
judge it very well, and I'm not writing this email to attack either of
these organizations.  But I think Mike put my fears pretty well in this
conversation:

https://identi.ca/conversation/65756730#notice-66555519

  'of course, but it seems "app store" is an incantation making people
  forget "free software", hints of that in interview above...'

On the other hand, maybe this could be not all terrible, even good for
free software.  Honestly, in comparison to normal "app stores", free
software already has great packaging solutions between apt, yum, etc,
and I think that app stores really aren't much more than DRM'ed package
managers that don't handle library dependencies in an efficient way. :)

However, on the web front we really don't have anything for client-side
web applications.  There's been a lot of excitement about
standards-based client-side web applications, and that really hasn't
come to fruition, but maybe now it will.  Would our existing packaging
solutions really be a good solution for that?  Maybe not, so maybe if
this is done correctly this could be a good way to have client-side web
applications packaging for free software.

However I'm doubtful, if for no other reason that *at minimum* there'd
have to be a good way to tell what the licensing is of applications, and
right now it's an absolute nightmare for me to figure out what license
things are under when I'm installing things from the firefox extensions
site.  But maybe we could be involved and guide things in a positive
direction.

This email was kind of rushed because I should really be working, and
also I still don't have clear thoughts on this, but I'd like to have
clearer thoughts.  So, thoughts, oh autonomo.us mailing list?

 - cwebb

PS: Also, this is being done under the banner of "open web", which
seems misleading considering the "open web gaming" stuff:

https://mozillalabs.com/gaming

...had a competition in which iirc the majority of winning finalists
were proprietary games.  Yes yes, "open" has long had problems as a
term, but maybe the term "standardized web" is less misleading.

(This isn't to hate on Mozilla, which I think is massively an ally of
ours generally.)

-- 
𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓹𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓐𝓵𝓵𝓪𝓷 𝓦𝓮𝓫𝓫𝓮𝓻