Day 1 - Keynote¶
With Software as a service, is only the network luddite free?¶
The history of computers and freedom
Date: Wednesday 8, 2008 Bradley M. Kuhn
In the Beginning¶
- There were computers
- There were users
- …and users had freedom
Ye Old Four freedoms¶
- To learn
- To cope and share
- To modify
- To share modified versions
Then freedom eluded us¶
- Software licensing stuff
- Who invented software licensing?
- Gates convinced IBM to license rather than acquire DOS
Who fixed the problem¶
- Richard Stallman
- Lived through the golden age
- Programmed on old systems
The Golden Age¶
- Academic computer
- software sharing
- no licenses
MIT AI Lab¶
- Discovered that patents == money
- Spin-offs == $$$
GNU¶
- changed the world
- For the user of individual computers
- No reason now not to have freedom on your own machine
Internet changes little¶
- Client/server computer model
- Freedom implications are basically the same
- Email example
Email: The MTA¶
- Free email software
- Plenty of proprietary ones
- RFCs define interoperability
- We reverse-engineer RFC-less protocols
Email: Maul User agents¶
- Yours has freedom
What changed¶
- The browser delivered applications
- AJAX made it more powerful
- Where is computing done?
- Computing in the cloud
- Are our freedoms under threat by cloud?
Email become gmail¶
- The experience
- Effectively thin client
- Mixes up free again: Price vs. Freedom
- RFCs no longer enough
- We are back to proprietary “lock-in”
- Other examples is twitter, amazon cloud, etc
Users and the cloud¶
- Clouds affect us even when we don’t really we are using it
- Richard Stallman is nervous
What’s the challenge?¶
- Not merely a question of code and licensing
- A question of code/data control
- Power to move code/data/people and transport it to somewhere else
- Autonomy: of code, data, community
- Example: Trying to leave Twitter
How do we start dealing with this challenge?¶
- Plone is GPL which is good
- Plone is 100% open source
Keep going¶
- User communities need ability to move
- Reclaim your data and relocate your community
- This is tough programming
Projects to look at¶
- identi.ca (laconi.ca): Twitter replacement
- Prophet: Distributed database for web applications
- Move community via sneakernet, ideal for China
- Ourselves
- Affero GPL
- Extends copyleft to network service world
- Handles the code side well
- Techniques to look at:
- Deployed applications auto-give users source
- Data is downloadable in community-chunks
Future of the Cloud¶
- Disjointed but integraed
- portable
- Developers decide next direction
- Ask if we are respecting user’s freedoms
- Data belongs to users, and we are merely custodians