The last week has been an interesting nexus of Open and Free.

On Saturday I attended the Firefox OS App day in Wellington. I had heard about Firefox OS some time ago under its project name Boot2Geeko (b2g). At the time I had thought that it was an intriguing idea, but wouldn't be very powerful. I was certainly wrong. Firefox OS is fairly mature and looking like it will be very powerful. Check out arewemobileyet.com for an idea where they are heading (for example WebUSB!) It appeared to work well on the developer phones (re-flashed Android phones, the same Linux kernel is used).

All the applications on Firefox OS are web applications. In particular, they are Open Web Apps, using HTML5, CSS and Javascript. Even the phone dialer is an HTML5/JS app! Mozilla showed off a framework for building apps called mortar that takes care of the basic UI consistent with the standard apps, but you could use any html5/css/js tools or frameworks. Unless you use some of the newer (and higher security required) APIs, the apps also work in a normal web browser.

I wasn't able to stick around to see what people developed, but it was very interesting.

Last night I watched the live stream of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, giving a public lecture in Wellington (I missed out on a ticket) on "The Open Internet and World Wide Web". He covered the many forms of openness and freedom, including open standards, open source software, open access, open data, and open Internet. One key point from the lecture was that native apps (on IOS or Android, for example) take you off the Web, and therefore away from the core of social discourse. This is significant and currently increasingly happening. I will tweet a link when the lecture is available to view online.

These events dovetail nicely and fits with my general strategy of focusing on web apps that work nicely on phones, tablets, and computers.