[Owncloud] apps review and categories

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 12.10.2012, at 10:50, Christian Reiner <foss at christian-reiner.info> wrote:

> Hi Frank, hello all, 
> 
> On Friday 12 October 2012 10:25:07 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>> independent 3rd party apps for ownCloud are getting more and more important
>> for us. [...] So building an app ecosystem around a small ownCloud core is
>> important. Because of that we have to work on the tools to build this
>> ecosystem.
> 
> this is _really_ good news from my point of view. Thanks for taking action!
> 
>> ownCloud versions:
>> [...] Currently it is only possible to select one ownCloud version. In
>> the future when we have apps that are compatible with different releases we
>> will add options to select several different versions. 
> 
> Please not that such apps already exist. 
> So that is not some future problem "once ownCloud get's there". 
> 
>> Approval workflow:
> 
> Clearly makes sense, however: 
> Since this in effect means censorship (not meant in a bad way here) it appears 
> to be very important to have a well defined, public catalog of aspects that 
> apps must be conform with. Otherwise such a revision process might be regarded 
> as arbitrariness. App developers must know about these rules beforehand. 
> 
> This because that review process will almost certainly not only be used to 
> block apps published to spread backdoors, but also to control general quality: 
> security aspects like CSRF & XSS, desctructive behaviour towards the 
> installation or other apps, missuse of features or gaps and so on. 

Thanks a for the feedback.
I disagree that this has anything to do with censorship. Everybody can publish apps in the repo, other websites or somewhere else. Installation is super easy by just putting it in the the apps folder of your ownCloud. No one is censoring anything here. Please don´t confuse this with the way others like Apple is doing this.
The only thing that we do is to make sure that the Apps that can be installed and executed with one click by random users have QA.

And I agree that the process should be transparent and documented of course.


Frank