Homebrew Hot Apps Telethon supporting Homebrew Developers 12
Palm's Hot Apps program is chugging along nicely, with the $1 million socked away and ready to distribute in July. As always, our favorite way to track it is via the Hot Apps Leaderboard, in particular the Fastest Movers section. It's a great program for apps that make it into the Official App Catalog.
What about Homebrew apps? There's some exciting news there too. Runukraine in our forums has kicked off a telethon to donate money to WebOS Internals with a goal of raising $5,000 by Friday. For their part, WebOS Internals decided the best thing to do is share the love with Homebrew developers and announced they're taking some of the donations and distributing them to Homebrew developers, both to app and patch developers.
So if you're a homebrewer or patcher and haven't laid out any of your hard-earned yet, donating before Friday would be an awfully nice gesture. (Update: a gentle reminder from some devs that homebrew apps need to be open source to qualify)
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12 Comments
Havent had an article by Derek for a long time. :) miss him.
While I think a homebrew hot apps contest is a really cool idea, I think it's worth noting that they're only supporting and including open source apps and patches. Closed source apps that were the result of the work of many dedicated developers in their spare time and in most cases are provided to the community free of charge are excluded.
Maybe a separate contest dedicated to closed-source apps in the future? I'd support that.
Personally I don't think they should ever be separated when discussing the homebrew community. Both open and closed source developers created the homebrew community. This contest is not what I would consider a true homebrew appreciation event. It's an open source appreciation event. And that's fine as long as it's labeled as such (as it was in the original forum thread).
A quote from rwhitby
"Open Source Homebrew Hot Apps & Patches
We believe that the development of open source homebrew apps has been critical to the success of the webOS platform, especially in providing open, reusable source code examples for developers to learn from and bootstrap their applications.
Yet the existing Hot Apps program from Palm does not show any love to those developers. And it does not even start to recognise the awesome work that many developers have put into creating Patches for our devices.
So we're going to use the next $1K raised in this telethon (and perhaps even more, depending on what the final total is) to distribute $100 each to the top 10 downloaded open source homebrew packages from ipkg.preware.org (the location from which Preware and WebOS Quick Install download applications, themes, patches, kernels, services, etc)."
The money webosinternals decides to distribute to homebrew and patch devs is their own to pick who should get it. They (as far as I can tell) really believe in open source, and that's who they choose to donate money to.
I don't mean to say that devs who make closed source homebrew and patches aren't as worthy or good or anything like that (I respect all the devs talents and contributions to this community) I just think that open source is more the community webosinternals supports and its their money to do so. If you think a closed source project deserves it more donate to them instead (or better yet also).
Unlike you I don't see this as a "contest" rather just people showing appreciation to other people for their work for this community.
Did you know that the majority of the icons shown at the top of this article are not open source? This picture depicts all of the great apps that are being excluded from this homebrew recognition: https://sites.google.com/site/hedamifiles/homebrew_apps.jpg
There may be others in the picture that are also closed source. 3 of the apps are definitely open source. I couldn't find the other icons in the homebrew gallery.
Many of the developers of these apps have been here from the beginning and are key contributors to the homebrew community. Some people may not remember, but there was a time when there were very few apps in the official catalog. These developers released their apps (for free) on Precentral and gave the community a large repository of great apps to run on their devices.
I would wager that the vast majority of homebrew apps in the Precentral homebrew gallery are closed source and thus excluded from this appreciation. This is why I indicated that it was worth noting that this event is only including open source apps/patches/themes.
The webOS Internals group can run the event in any way they'd like. They are graciously sharing the money the community donated to them. I just wanted to be sure that people reading this article and who pledge support for this initiative understand that not all (in fact probably most) homebrew developers are not being included.
Fully agree. In all posts and tweets I have made about this I have been very careful to specify that only open source applications are eligible. I would support changing the title of this article to make that clear to those readers who don't click through the links and see that in the title and body of the forum threads.
WebOS Internals holds open source development as one of the key principles upon which it was created and continues to exist. For us to reward closed source development would be against that principle. WebOS Internals development cannot directly benefit from closed source applications.
Note that we have no issue with developers who choose to release apps as closed source, and we respect the choices that such developers make. However, closed source apps simply don't fit within the boundaries of the WebOS Internals interests, and are therefore excluded from this event.
-- Rod
What makes the community so damn special. Nice one!
This would be a great event to host on an annual basis; perhaps on the birthday of the homebrew scene (some time in July or August, not sure). Love to see all the support so far. I'll be donating once I get a PayPal account set up later today. :)
Dieter, which apps are represented by the icons you used in your graphic for this article?
Thanks for the front page shout out!!! We appreciate it, keep the support coming!!! Please DIGG my story on the Telethon and post it on your twitter, facebook, etc....
Donation made!
Thanks for all the hard work it is GREATLY appreciated!