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Free Network Services – Benjamin Mako Hill [Wikimania 2008, notes]

GIMPShopped GulmoharImage by Harshad Sharma via Flickr

Free Software Definition

 

The freedom to:

 

  • Use software for any purpose (libra, not gratis)
  • Study and modify
  • Distribute copies to others
  • Collabroate and share your changes

 

Read more at the FSF page: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

 

Free Software is really about Control. Communications technologies that we use have profound effect on how people communicate. This is immense power, that we don’t want the companies to have.

 

Network Services

 

The basic idea of network services are these tools that doesn’t run on our own computer, but somewhere on the grid. Traditionally free software requires access to my software.

Example of network services are: Google, Facebook and even Wikipedia. These are services that most of people are spending most of their Internet time one.

 

The most simple positive effects of network services is that they usually work on alternative operating systems like Linux distributions or OS X. But it doesn’t really matter what you are running on your computer, since Google now has efficiently it’s own proprietary operating system. This means that user freedom has actually decreased with time.

 

The Affero approach to opposing negative affect of network services to free software.

 

We need technical and legal ability to modify and protect the freedoms. In the past the Freedom worked great, because the software had to be distributed. This is a problem for network services since there is no distribution.

 

The Affero GPL license (AGPL) ensures that the free software you write for networked service, the source code is released to users that uses it.

 

LiveJournal is released under AGPL, so you can run your own version if you want.

SourceForge also opened it, once they opened it people create GForge.

 

But AGPL is not enough, since we don’t get the data.

 

Autonomo.us

 

Group of hackers, activist, scholars and free thinkers that are exploring these issues.

 

Franklin Street Statement – What the best practices are today for free network services.

 

Developers

 

  • Use the GNU Affero GPL
  • Develop free-licensed alternatives to non-free service
  • Develop software that can replace centralized services

 

Service Providers

 

  • Choose Free Software
  • Release customizations freely
  • Make data available:
  • Users should control their private data
  • Data available to all users of the service should be free

 

Users

 

  • Run distributed alternatives to services
  • Use services that follow the guidelines above

 

Franklin Street Statement in full – http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

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