Plasma Active App Store Notes

[Laszlo Papp]

Hey,

There are a few things that I would like to comment on, regarding the
Plasma Active App Store project. I know it may be a bit presumptuous,
and perhaps intrusive, at this stage, but please bear with me.

1) I have tried to understand all the bits behind the App Store, and
my realization from around two years experience in the mobile field
was that this was one of the services for which we worked on the Open
Collaboration Services Standard [1]. It was designed with this use
case in mind, and is already used for very similar use cases, like the
maemo download service, and recently the Apps4MeeGo community store
(the term is misleading, it is not just about MeeGo).  You can find
the relevant service(s) here:
http://apps.formeego.org/ocs/providers.xml

>From what I have understood, and please do feel free to correct me,
the server, developed by Aaron, established a "custom protocol" for
communication between the server and client, based on json. I was
wondering if any consideration was given to OCS for this ? I have not
seen any discussions on the OCS mailing list about the drawbacks of
OCS for this task, if any. Please do not take it offense; I am just
curious, as one of the OCS contributors. I would personally be happy
to improve the standard if it lacks somehow for the Plasma Active App
Store purposes. We, as contributors, have already invested a decent
amount of time to satisfy this use case, and I personally feel that my
experience within this area has been wasted, since we were not even
contacted . :/

2) My other (personal) opinion is about how the development has been
happening. I may be wrong about this, but my impression from the
sprint was that it happens behind the scenes. Is this for a business
reason? It means that both the Open Governance and closed Business
models are present. I am not saying this is wrong, just curious since
I find the Plasma Active project promising in general. It would be
much easier to provide feedback and suggestions and gain contributors
in this early phase. I am just afraid that once it is out, it will be
hard to change certain issues, and can slow down the process as a
result of losing some potential participants.

3) It was nice to see a demo about the Ui draft from Marco during the
sprint in Darmstadt, thanks again for that. I am looking forward to
seeing the publisher client or website in the future!

Best Regards,
Laszlo Papp

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services-draft