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US Government Sets Up Online "App Store"
krapper writes "The Obama administration has unveiled a government 'app store' designed to push the federal bureaucracy into the era of cloud computing. The change means some federal employees will begin using services like YouTube, Gmail and WordPress, which store data on private internet servers instead of on those paid for with public money. The process will start small but will ramp up quickly, Vivek Kundra, the US chief information officer, said in a blog post on Tuesday. 'Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology,' Kundra writes in the post on WhiteHouse.gov. 'We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.' The app store is designed for federal employees doing official government business and is not intended for use by the public."
...they'll be too important to fail?
Agreed. This seems to be more of an official non-classified download repository than anything else. If I were in a small business and called their samba share that had the install images of Office, Acrobat, and other licensed packages for internal use an "app store", I'd be looked at by their IT people like I was some troll or pirate.
To me, a true "app store" is something like Apple's offering, Handango, Digital River, or a place where one looks through a catalog and either downloads a demo, or pays a license fee, then gets an executable to download.
There are some things I'd like to see the USG do though, if they are offering a large repository like this for internal use. The first thing is to PGP or gpg sign everything on the store so if it gets tampered with, one can find the app that has no or an invalid signature. (I'd also like to see Authenticode signing on Windows installs, and gpg package signing on BSD/RedHat/debian as another method that is transparent to the user, but will alert them if something is not right.)