On 05/22/2012 05:31 PM, Anant Narayanan wrote: > [...] If the author of a free app wishes to list it only on > specific stores, that's their decision to make.
On 05/28/2012 06:25 PM, Anant Narayanan wrote: > > That's an incorrect statement. We are defaulting to openness and > optionally allowing developers to control how their app is distributed. > Which is still in my book, completely orthogonal to the question of > openness. Im my opinion, if you give the tools for an application developer to do a whitelist of marketplaces allowed to install its application, you are giving the tools to prevent openness. By definition, the web should be accessible from everywhere and to everyone. A webapp isn't a website but is still part of the web. It can be understandable that we make this not true for paid applications because there is a relation of trust that is required. However, for free applications, adding this seems to add an artificial barer to the web's openness. An analogy is UA sniffing: Mozilla and other browser makers are already complaining a lot of UA sniffing, what would you say if the Web Platform had an API to make UA sniffing easier? That would be a very good way to make the web less open. In addition, this feature gives all the tools needed to simplify a monopolistic situation where a marketplace has enough power to make sure it's the only one whitelisted. At that point, no user would have any reason to use any other marketplace and we would end up in the exact same situation Android or iOS are in, except that we would be able to argue that our API is allowing diversity... If we implement what Gerv is proposing, we would make sure we do not give the tools for a closed and monopolistic webapp ecosystem and, if really needed, reverting the change would still be doable. Cheers, -- Mounir _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
