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The AO is a standards- and consensus-building project amongst the many projects of the free software / open source communities. Often, when projects decide to add a plugins or modules functionality, it is because the devs are unable to agree on what is essential, and/or are attempting to farm additional labor from an alienated plugins dev community.
The AO is a project to integrate the many existing and working useful open-source projects into one (or a few) usable end-products that are useful for specific users for specific use-cases. These use-cases are things we're all familiar with, that we all want to do with our computers, such as taking notes, planning a todo list, or sharing a photo album privately with a group of people. There are really not that many of these core features, and they are simple enough that we all want mostly the same functionality.
However, the AO will eventually add a modules feature and it will be glorious. Something that will make the AO's modules different from other plugin systems, such as Firefox's Add-ons, will be that AO modules will be able to require dependencies in sequence. All current AO modules will be part of one sequence, such that when all modules are activated, the sequence is included and activated within the AO in the same order. That is because choices to include features are hierarchical and also represent living user communities forking or merging.