Aaron Williamson's webl

I’ve been working on developing a free software application market for Android.¹ The obvious place to start was the SlideME Community Edition code, which as far as I know is the only existing free software project that does even part of the job. Unfortunately, SlideME’s Community Edition was abandoned due to “lack of community interest” in April 2008, several months before the first Android phones were even available. So most of the work I’ve done so far was to update the code to work with the current SDK, rework the interface to behave in a more standard way, and rewrite portions that relied on now-unavailable API elements.

FLOSS Dispenser (like SlideME) works in conjunction with a J2EE server application called JVending. JVending’s public repository was also abandoned by SlideME some time ago, so I’m maintaining a fork of JVending along with my fork of FLOSS Dispenser as a part of the Replicant project.

I put up build instructions for FLOSS Dispenser as well as for JVending; using these, you should be able to build both and have them work together. However, neither one is ready, which is why I’m not hosting an application store already. The FLOSS Dispenser code in particular is pretty buggy (most of them aren’t mine, but only because I haven’t written much of it), for one thing. For another, the system doesn’t yet facilitate GPL compliance — you can download and install apk binaries, but they don’t come with source code and license text. Until at least this feature exists, I don’t recommend anyone serve GPL’d apks to the public using JVending. Update: The client application is now in a working alpha state. The really bad bugs have been hammered out and source can be delivered with the apk (the mechanism for this is nonoptimal, but functional). The challenge now is to enable users of the server to submit new apps easily, and to enable admins to moderate them.

I wanted to have this and some other issues hammered out before I put the code up, but I was motivated by Jonathan Corbet’s recent LWN article on Android to just put up what I had and try to get some help. I know other people are interested in something like this, and though I’m hardly proud of the little coding I’ve done on this, it’s the best start we have for a free market.

So by all means, take a look and help me kick this thing out the door.

1. The quick rationale for this is that the Android Market 1) is not itself free software, and 2) doesn’t enable you to search for applications by their license. [↩]

Managing your life online isn’t easy.  You use email, IM, and other social tools.  You create, manage, and share documents.  You search for things you’re interested in and research things you’re working on.  You track your finances to the penny and buy everything you need.  You store your private medical records and access information about your health.

To do all of this, you maintain countless passwords, chase your friends across an ever-increasing variety of social networks, and constantly move documents and data between your personal computer and various web services.  But often there’s no good way to get data from here to there — the sites you use may not accept the data format you have or communicate with the other sites holding your data.  Sometimes, the sites you use stop offering the features you need, or are bought by larger companies and shut down to quash competition in a key market.

Google Labs is changing all that with Goolog.  Now, when your life is stored in Google’s services, we keep track of it for you. No more separate identities. No more wondering where all of your friends went. No more moving from place to place.

Take a look at some of the things Goolog takes over for you:

Single point of entry

Remember all of those usernames and passwords you used before?  Now, you don’t have to.  There’s only one way into Goolog: the Google Account login and password you already have!  You won’t need to remember how to log in anywhere else, because you won’t need to go anywhere else.  That’s because, as we like to say at Google Labs…

Everything you do is right here

We already kept your email and your documents for you, and showed you how easy it was to communicate and work with other people in Goolog (though of course we didn’t call it Goolog at the time).  You didn’t have to track your communications and personal documents across folders, hard drives, and websites, because we were tracking them all for you.

Now, we can track everything else too.  You can keep your whole life — the books you read, the things you buy, all your creativity, all the news you get, everything you say, see, and hear, everything you know, your time, your work, your wellbeing, and your money — all right here in Goolog.  What this means is that you don’t ever have to worry about getting it back out again, because all of our services integrate with one another.  Your Health and Finance records are Docs, your Docs move through GMail and Groups, and on to your Sites or your Blog(ger).  Your GMail messages generate Calendar entries and when you Talk we listen, and figure out what you’re trying to do.

Starting to see how much less you need to think about when Goolog is in control?  It gets better.

Goolog is social

Not only is everything you do in Goolog, but everyone you know is here too.  (Ok, maybe not everyone just yet.)  So it’s as easy for you to share everything you do with others as it is to move your data between our services.  And it’s easy for us too!  Now, we can tell the people you know what you’re doing even when you don’t ask us to.

Goolog is exactly what it sounds like

But the social features don’t end there.  The best part of communicating in Goolog is that we hear everything you say, whether you’re emailing, IMing, blogging, or even talking on the phone.  And just like our name implies, we log all of it.

This enables us to make our services more useful to you, because when we keep track of everything you do, we can relate what you’re doing now to what you did months ago, and better understand what you’re trying to do.  It also enables us to make useful data about what people do online available to the public (we anonymize all of the data first, of course).  And finally, it enables us to better serve our partners, by providing them with access to better information about their target markets.

No need to sign up

The best part is that you don’t need to hound your friends for an invite to Goolog. You don’t have to opt in. If you have a Google Account, you’re already in Goolog. So relax… everything you do is right here.