Can Free Software step up to the webapp plate?

This has been a week of personal realisations. How it is all about the personal with Facebook. And how Google is planning to shift us to the cloud.

The writing has been on the sky for a while: Google Apps is a collection of mighty office webapps. I like them and use them a lot.

I have noticed how Firefox has started to groan under the assembled weight of all my webapps, and if it weren’t for Firebug and a couple of other addons, I think I might have made the switch to Google Chromium a while ago.

And then I noticed the Chrome Web Store making a subtle arrival on my Chromium home page:

Google Chrome Web Store

Wow. So much candy. What caught my eye, as a web designer, was Pixlr, a Photoshop-esque webapp. Free. But not Free Software:

Pixlr on the Google Chrome Web Store

So this led me to thinking, the exquisite and potent Inkscape is a vector drawing program that uses Scalable Vector Graphics as its base format, and SVG is supported in some shape or form by pretty much all modern browsers.

How hard would it be for the exceptionally talented Inkscape team to create an Inkscape webapp? And ditto with GIMP? Is there enough demand for such webapp software yet? If it isn’t created, then will Free Software slip behind?