Re: [autonomo.us] Web app stores

[Christopher Allan Webber]

This is a useful email!  I'll just comment on a few things:

>> ...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.
>
> As for the addons site (AMO), I used to work on that. It's been
> awhile, but I can say the team is pretty open to contributors and
> discussion. The software is admittedly a bit high-bar to get running
> and hacking.
>
> But, you can find more details here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/AMO
>
> Also, the guys behind Apps at Mozilla hang out on mailing lists and
> IRC, if you're interested:
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs
> irc://irc.mozilla.org/labs
> irc://irc.mozilla.org/openwebapps

I wrote this up before I talked to Kumar McMillan about this at PyCon,
and he told me to file a bug.  My fault for not removing this when
making this post.  I kind of made it hastily today to get it off my TODO
list since it's been floating there since I tried to post it earlier
when the list wasn't running.

Also, looking at the "release notes" part of:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/

It looks like I'm wrong.  Shame on me.  There are still some things I'd
like to have as in terms of being able to filter searches and list views
by license, etc, but I'm making TODO items now to file proper bugs about
those :)

>> 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.)
>
> I wasn't involved in the Game On project, myself. But, I do know
> everyone involved, and I can say there were no nefarious motives at
> work. I'm not sure what the whole story was, but I think it was
> intended as an honestly open effort.

I don't think there was anything nefarious either.  I think I'm just
personally disappointed in the term "open web" where I think
"standardized web" is a more useful term.  This is more me being grumpy
about terminology here than anything else.

Again, thanks for this email.  I'm not trying to drum up hate against
app stores on the web without reason.  The terminology thus far though
has been used in the history of app stores as they've existed so far to
mean package management that tends to be fairly unfriendly to a free
software ecosystem though, so that's the direction of concern I've been
coming from.

 - cwebb

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