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Palm’s App Catalog Should Embrace Open Source, Not Reject It

From OStatic blogs

It’s no news to anyone that Palm is desperate to make a success of its Palm Pre phone. It was met with very solid reviews initially, and AdMob’s latest wireless traffic metrics show it gaining market share. Nevertheless, Palm’s recent revenue forecast missed Wall Street applications by a long shot, and that’s heading into the important holiday season, when the iPhone and many new Android handsets are likely to go on a tear.

Apple’s success with the iPhone, of course, has a lot to do with its App Store, which has now moved over 2 billion applications. To put that 2 billion number in perspective, that’s not far behind the total number of songs sold on iTunes since its inception years ago. Palm would very wise to try to compete with Apple’s App Store through openness in its Palm App Catalog, along the lines of how Android Market pursues openness. That’s why it’s disturbing news that a Netscape veteran is reporting that his apps were rejected from the App Catalog because the source code was available elsewhere.

In this post, Jamie Zawinski, who was behind many Netscape software milestones, describes his "Kafkaesque" experience trying to get a restaurant tip calculator app and a clock app accepted to Palm’s app catalog. He says that Palm went back-and-forth with him many times in annoying ways, but the worst thing he reports is that Palm allegedly sent him a message saying this:

"Required: You can only distribute your app via the Palm App Catalog. Do not make your app available on your website or anywhere other than the App Catalog."

Zawinski writes:

"They were objecting to the existence of the source code and binary executables on my Tip Calculator and Dali Clock web sites!"

Zawinski also wrote Palm back with this pointed opinion:

"Apple has been shooting itself in the foot over its app store policies lately, and their idiocy has been your gain. Don’t screw this up. If you try to maintain as much control as they do over the applications available, you are going to be a footnote."

I couldn’t agree more. Openness, where Apple has had anything but open policies for its App Store, is one of the primary advantages that Palm should try to leverage with its App Catalog. Android Market is growing nicely through open policies. Palm’s webOS has many open source components. It’s almost mind-boggling that the company wouldn’t want to aggressively pursue leveraging open source applications, rather than rejecting them.

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