Developer Roundup – Talking About Open Sourcing webOS with Zhephree
Who can make a FourSquare app better than FourSquare? Who can make apps with names like Neato! and Incredible! and make them even more awesome than “neato” and “incredible”?
Geoff Gauchet, that’s who. You know him and love him as @zhephree on twitter and he’s taken a moment from his autograph signings to sit down with us and share his thoughts on Open Sourcing webOS.
So, tell me Geoff…
Now that HP intends to open source webOS, what does that mean for you as a developer?
For me, it means the decisions I’ve made to be a webOS developer first weren’t worthless. It means that my time and money spent developing apps wasn’t short-sighted and I can continuing being a mobile developer.
Going forward do you anticipate you will develop further apps for webOS?
I’m sure of it. I’ve always said that as long as there are a reasonable number of webOS users, I’ll be a webOS developer.
Do you plan to develop for other platforms? If so, which?
Absolutely. While webOS is anything but dead, it’s still rough to make any real money or garner any real audience. I plan on doing my best to port my existing apps to iOS and Android, and quite likely Windows Phone. I’ll probably continue to roll with HTML/JavaScript development for my apps and use something like PhoenGap. Once Enyo is officially open-sourced, porting existing apps will be extremely easy.
Do you plan on contributing to the project itself, besides just continued application development?
Probably not, but that’s mostly because I have no idea how the inner workings of an OS work. I’m a front-end kind of guy. That, and, I really barely have the time for my own projects. But who knows.
What role would you like to see HP take in governing the project?
I’d like to see them maintain some sort of repository of assets (aside form just on GitHub or whatever). Maybe even host and maintain the App Catalog in some capacity. I’d like to see them open up the App Catalog app to allow additional sources, PreWare style. That could be handy.
Are there any thoughts on licensing options you would like to see used for the open sourced OS and/or its frameworks such as ENYO? For example MIT, Apache, GPL
I’m not the most knowledgeable when it comes to what different licenses allow, but I know Apache has been thrown around as a good option and it’s what my foursquare and growl apps are licensed under.
Are there other open source projects that you feel are good examples of how you would like to see the webOS project operate? For example, JQuery.
Again, not the most knowledgeable about the OSS community, but certainly projects like Firefox have been nice examples of a solid open source project that has garnered public awareness. While I can’t speak to how it’s run, it is successful and contributed to regularly, which are two aspects I’d love to see applied to webOS.
Thanks for Geoff Gauchet!
