You know how when you get an Android, Windows Phone, iPhone or whatever else that it comes pre-populated with some basic apps? Someone has to make those. With Ubuntu Phone OS, Canonical is asking the Ubuntu Phone OS community to chip in, which is a departure from the earlier situation where Canonical was criticized for “an alleged closed doors approach to development.”

There are 12 core apps that will ship with the phone: calendar, clock, weather, calculator, email, RSS, file manager, document viewer, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Terminal and account manager. Canonical has already reached out for programming volunteers, but they are still looking for design suggestions for the apps themselves. In a sense, this is a crowdsourcing project.

If you feel like chipping in, then you can head over to the CoreApps page on the Ubuntu wiki, click on the app you want to work on, and contribute to the wiki.

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Palm may have been the company to produce webOS, but Mozilla might be the company to produce one of the first truly web-based operating systems for smartphones. Dubbed Boot 2 Gecko, it’s a mobile OS that relies primarily on the web… not unlike the Chrome OS for Chromebooks.

The new OS is currently under development as the Mozilla team is working on its “proprietary, single-vendor stacks.” Various APIs for the camera, phone, SMS, and so on are also be developed. The idea here is to have a truly stripped down OS for contacts and phone, and getting everything else through the web.

You’ll notice that early drawings depict an icon-based OS, which will largely fall in line with people already familiar with iOS, Android, and even webOS. We also hear that Boot 2 Gecko will use Android for booting and drivers, but HTML5 for most other functions. In any case, I’m not sure we need yet another OS option. We’ve already seen the slow death of webOS, the diminishing market share of BB, the less than optimistic outlook for QNX/BBX. Even WP7.5 is having a tough time.

In any case, I’m sure the legal types in Cupertino are already readying their papers for another patent infringement suit. I can feel it in my bones.

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