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Walled Gardens are Driving me to JavaScript

I fear that someday soon, native programs that I have written and rely on won't run on my own computers because I won't have the money to buy a vendor specific compiler tool chain or a vendor provided signing certificate. Because of this, I'm going to make an effort to port all of my applications to generic JavaScript and hope that the vendors won't try to devise ways in which to stop that from running.

Here's a demo of SHA1_Pass in generic JavaScript http://16s.us/sha1_pass/why. It's not as functional as the native, desktop application, but it's works for my needs. Edit: This demo only works with Chrome and FireFox.

As a kid who began writing code on a C64, it's really sad to see the move to app stores, signed code, approval processes and vendor required dev tools. What do others on HN think? Is there a future for independent developers who write native code? Will our native apps stop running on our own computers?

55 points 16s 14 years ago 71 comments

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