Henri Bergius, a free software guy and a Maemo/MeeGo enthusiast, writes on his blog: "... I've been appalled of the direction this "Post-PC era" is taking us. Through patent wars and locked-down app stores, the world of mobile software is becoming a power play where some win big and everybody else loses. ... It is interesting that we software developers are now driving ourselves to a world full of middlemen. A world where we suddenly have to ask for a permission to do something new. ... In a world where everything must go through the rules and regulations of an app store without any oversight we, the developers, will suddenly be in the same abused stage as artists are with their labels. We take all the risk and all the effort on building software for our users. The middleman then can invalidate all our hard work by arbitrarily making it impossible for their ecosystem to run the app. And even if they do accept the software, they'll take a hefty cut of the proceeds. ... How can this make sense to an independent developer?"
He goes on to look at where we came from, from the "PC” world where, ironically, things were not this bad. As I can see also, we may have had a Microsoft monopoly in the past, widely considered by many to be a very bad thing, if not even evil, but looking back, Microsoft never forced, at their sole discretion, selected developers and applications out of their operating systems, unlike what seems to be happening now in the "Post PC” world.
Personally I am not a free software guy, but I do share many of Henri's sentiments in this respect. The industry has taken us to a world where innovation can be stifled, as any given developer apparently must have permission from some large company to release an application to the public. This is not progress. In this respect, the "progress” has taken us backwards.
Henri points to a universal runtime as a way to go around the problem. The newly hyped Firefox OS and all the other various HTML5/JavaScript platforms of course try to point to the same direction. The problem is that this proposed "universal runtime” is a JavaScript runtime, perhaps with HTML rendering capabilities. And while HTML(5) may be cool, and certainly has a lot of practical use cases, HTML/JavaScript is not, and will never be, the way to write ALL possible applications. A world where all software will run inside a JavaScript virtual machine (and/or inside a web browser) will not be an ideal world either.
Rather than a universal runtime, we at Job and Esther Technologies are looking at runtime independence as a way to produce a world where developers continue to have a choice. Our current practical solution is of course Eqela, which provides a development platform without any decision or commitment on the runtime environment. The Eqela platform is runtime independent, and can enable the apps to run on various runtimes, including JavaScript, but also Java, .NET, C/C++/ObjC, etc. When developing an application, the developer does not need to make firm commitments on the target runtime environment; one can start with a Java target (eg. Android), but later on can move to and/or add JavaScript, C or some other platform, which might not even be existing at the time of writing the program.
Now that the Jolla news are all around, of course many of the free software groups are looking at Jolla as THE way forward. And while it is wonderful news indeed (the more competition we have in the industry, the less likely it is that consumers and developers will find themselves dependent on a single dominant vendor), it will never be good for developers to put all their eggs in a single basket, even if it was really free, really open, and really looking good. Like investment advisors have always used to say, "it is good to diversify, diversify, diversify”.
That is our mission. To help developers (and indirectly, consumers) diversify, diversify, diversify. And I am glad that in recent industry news, I have also seen signs of the same diversification. With the recent introduction of Firefox OS, and now Jolla mobile, both of which I hope will thrive and gain traction, we may be facing potential for a nice, diversified industry. We, on our side, will try to do our part to help make that world a better place for everybody.
