Ex-Mozillanoid JWZ writes of his “ongoing Kafka-esque nightmare of dealing with Palm and their App Catalog submission process.” (Part One) (Part Two).
His story shows, by counterexample, exactly why the Open Web is important. Part of the working definition I came up with in my previous post was that on the open web, no company can get between a developer who wants to publish something and a user who wants to use it. JWZ’s story shows what happens in a non-open environment when a company, Palm in this case, does get in the way. JWZ’s applications were innocuous free software which posed no conceivable threat to Palm in any way, and he didn’t even want to charge anything for them; nevertheless, Palm’s bureaucracy prevented JWZ from giving away his own software to people who wanted it.
When this happens, developers and users both lose.
Palm is not unique in this regard. The process for getting apps approved on the iPhone is no less opaque:
We’ve been getting more and more questions from customers wondering where the heck our iPhone App is. Unfortunately, we have no idea.
…
Despite sending a steady stream of emails to Apple requesting status updates, we continue to receive generic form letters in response – frustrating, to say the least.
Say what you like about Microsoft, but they never barred independent software developers from developing and distributing Windows software, did they?
October 28, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Yet. They have pretty much all the infrastructure in place at this point to require every app to have a signature by a code-signing key approved by Microsoft. And they’ve already used it to require signed drivers, and signatures on certain types of applications or plugins. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch that they’ll continue to require signatures in more situations over time.
Obviously flipping the switch all at once would incite a revolt, given the huge number of legacy apps built on Windows. But over time, it would prove easy enough to require signatures in order to use new and interesting APIs, slowly deprecate the old, and end up in a world where every interesting app needs an approved signature.
October 28, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Scary thought! And one more reason I hope the trend continues of interesting applications moving to the Web – it makes us less dependent on any one operating system vendor.
October 28, 2009 at 9:59 pm
How is signing an application different from signing an addon? I thought the idea was to ensure you know the origin(author) of the app/addon?
The best link I could come up with for the idea behind signing an application with a quick google search was this:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/signing_air_applications_02.html
I’d say your off base with your microsoft conspiracy theory here.
As for signing drivers that’s required to help ensure quality drivers. Why would they do that for applications? Applications generally can’t crash your OS like a driver could.
October 29, 2009 at 12:03 am
For what it’s worth, Palm recently made a significant change in their policy toward open source applications:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/10/palm-fixes-webos-developer-program-encourages-open-source.ars
October 30, 2009 at 2:22 am
Indeed, Christian is correct–Ben and Dion of Mozilla/Bespin/Ajaxian fame joined Palm in the midst of the JWZ debacle, and are now working hard to make Palm’s platform as open as possible.
October 30, 2009 at 9:14 am
Duh #1… yes of course Microsoft *could* do it with signed code… so could Apple on MacOS; but do they make app makers go through this app store style approval process? NO.