CoApp

CoApp stands for the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform, and is a project that started its existence within the mind of Garret Serack of Microsoft. The aim of CoApp is to bring Open Source Software (OSS) to Microsoft Windows and to do it right.

Many people look at applications like Mozilla Firefox and say to themselves, "See, they did it. It can't be that hard." However if you take a moment to look at the system that Mozilla has developed to bring Firefox and its cousin Thunderbird to Windows, it quickly becomes clear that the scale of effort is significant. Not only does Mozilla need to maintain its own software, it also needs to maintain the entire software stack that it depends on as well.

Other software projects struggle to gain traction on Windows because of the shear degree of effort it takes to bring their entire dependancy stack to Windows and to support it. Small and independant developers rarely choose a non Windows API if they want their software operational on Windows. In the case of frameworks like QT, it takes the enormous resources of Nokia to bring it to Windows, other projects without financial backing like GTK+ struggle to provide even rudimentary Windows implementations.

My Vision for CoApp

Currently Microsoft Windows sports an enormous majority in "mindshare" around the world. That said, the current state of Open Source software on Windows is pretty dismal. There are a couple jewels like Firefox out there, however the vast majority of the really great open source software has barely any traction at all on the Windows platform. My vision for CoApp is to create the access point for Open Source on Windows.

My mother uses Windows, and will likely continue to do so for the rest of her life. Most people in the world fall into exactly the same boat. My vision for CoApp is one that addresses these people directly. I want it to be easy to get at the good stuff; said another way, I want the challenges associated with finding software, getting it and updating it over time to go away. The perfect place to start is in the world of Open Source with its rich supply of tools, languages, platforms, games, etc, etc, etc.

My vision for CoApp also works for developers of software. I want a developer to be able to open the development platform of her choice, select what libraries she wants to depend on without her ever having to wonder how to compile them. And if she does choose to compile something from source, I want it to be incredibly easy for her to get the source, all neatly trussed up ready to be built in the exact way she wants it to be built.