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Reposted from webian.org

Firstly, thanks for the incredible continued contributions from the Webian community and for all the work you've done on Webian Shell, which has now had more than 95,000 downloads!

Introducing Krellian

This week I left my job as Product Manager of Clinked at Rabbitsoft to start a software consultancy called Krellian.

Through Krellian I will be able to continue to lead the Webian project, and I will also be taking up a new contract with the Mozilla Corporation to work with them on Boot to Gecko (B2G).

Like me and the other members of the Webian community, Mozilla believes that the open web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. The B2G project will include prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to web content, a privilege model to safely expose these new capabilities, a complete "low-level substrate" for Android-compatible devices and a collection of web apps to prioritise and prove the power of the platform.

Benefits to Webian

The potential benefits for Webian are enormous. Webian Shell was already hitting limitations of what is currently possible with Mozilla Chromeless and this new work on the core Mozilla platform promises to make many more of Webian's goals possible. While B2G initially focuses on the mobile space, Webian can focus on nettop and netbook form factors and perhaps eventually the two projects could even converge.

Sponsorship from Krellian will provide the ongoing resources necessary for running the Webian project and ensure that it remains free and open source.

I'm excited about this new chapter in Webian's story and believe more strongly than ever in the future of the open web.

When I first heard about Google's and then Mozilla's concepts of "installable web apps" I was a little dubious. Surely the whole benefit of web applications is that they don't need to be installed!

But if you think of installable web apps as a convergence of the "app store" and "cloud computing" models (arguably the two most significant trends in the software industry today) it actually makes quite a lot of sense.

The diversity of different software platforms available for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and PCs is great for encouraging competition and driving innovation - but it also causes problems for both app developers and consumers. An app written for Apple's iOS for example will not run on Android, Blackberry OS, WebOS, Meego, Bada, Symbian or any other competing platform. For consumers this is confusing and frustrating because unless they allow themselves to be locked in to a single vendor they may have to re-purchase different apps for different devices. For app developers it's even more frustrating because they're faced with a bewildering array of platforms to target their software at.

Web applications have different problems with limited discoverability and access to hardware. To a web browser web applications are no different to any other web site which means that the apps can easily get lost in the ocean of content on the web. Web apps also traditionally have very limited default access to client-side hardware for security reasons which limits their capabilities when compared to native applications.

Installable web apps can combine the best parts of web applications (the benefits of cloud computing and accessiblity from any device) with the best parts of the app store model (easy distribution and discovery of software which has full access to the device's hardware). This new breed of apps could leverage web technologies to reach the whole range of competing platforms with a single application which can be distributed via a range of competing app stores. By "installing" a web application the user can pre-approve access to local hardware like offline storage, accelerated graphics and geolocation to allow the app to make the most of the hardware it's running on and the user can keep a local repository of all the applications they use.

Both developers and consumers only have to worry about one kind of application running on one open platform (the web), but still have a choice of hardware and app stores. In this model the only people who lose out are the corporations who seek to lock consumers into their own products and services.

It could take a long time for installable web apps to become the predominant model of software distribution, but the idea of converging cloud computing with the app store model makes the idea very appealing and might go some way to explaining why Google currently has both the Android and Chrome OS operating systems in development. Each OS is approaching the convergence from a different direction whilst maximising on the market potential of what can already be done today.

I hope that standards for "installable web apps" can be agreed upon sooner rather than later so that if this model does become a growing trend, the new breed of apps will not suffer from the same fragmentation as other platforms do today.