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

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 donâ€™t want the companies to have.

Network Services

The basic idea of network services are these tools that doesnâ€™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 doesnâ€™t really matter what you are running on your computer, since Google now has efficiently itâ€™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 donâ€™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/