Open Sourcing bundled Apps and Support for "native" Apps

[secondtruth]

Is there a plan to open source the other system apps (additionally to the terminal) too? Because in a self-hosted instance it feels a bit weird that even the bundled system apps get loaded from puter.com and are not available locally in the instance.

This takes me to my next question: Is it planned or possible to have apps that "live" natively inside their windows instead of being iframes? This would be especially useful for the bundled apps or other use cases yet to discover.

[jelveh]

We'd like to open-source as many apps as possible. There are a some issues here though:

• self-hosted is currently in alpha so we have a ton of urgent work before going into apps.
• some of the apps (such as Viewer) use proprietary third-party libraries which we can't release under an open-source license, since we don't have the rights to do so.
• third-party apps cannot be bundled with the repo since they don't belong to us. We don't have the right to open-source them.
• loading apps in iframes rather than bundling them would generally mean that you'll have the very latest version AND we can actually, for the most part, give access to apps that have proprietary code in them.

This takes me to my next question: Is it planned or possible to have apps that "live" natively inside their windows instead of being iframes? This would be especially useful for the bundled apps or other use cases yet to discover.

Not yet, the reason we use iframes is mostly because of the ironclad security and sandboxing features it offers. You can build native window apps by extending the UIWindow.js component. I've used this extensively actually, for example for the Settings app.

[secondtruth]

Thank you very much for your answer.