Free Software and it’s Changing Meaning

I endorse the franklin street statement released by autonomo.us.

See also the recently released and very important 5 reasons to avoid the iPhone 3G

This is a very important step towards updating the concept of Free Software and its meaning in a rapidly changing context of web based software. Almost everyone I know uses some kind of web based service, be it flickr, facebook, myspace or just email. When I mention the idea of email software to people, they are generally confused. It’s clear that most computer user’s relation to software and the very notion of software is rapidly changing. Similarly to this issue of software and where it resides or runs, many users of computers are baffled by the notion of hierarchical file systems and think that C:/ and / are a total mystery. Even software like iTunes, which runs locally, continues to hide the actual working of the file system from users,  automatically managing files and folders.

Online services have massive clear benefits, and thats why people use them. Yet the present a serious loss of control over where data is stored and what software is being run. The very notion that you should be able to look at the code of an application you’re running is abstracted far away from users of services like flickr.

Because of all this, this new initiative towards creating web based services that are free and use open, interchangable data formats is hugely important for anyone who cares about the freedom to use your computer however you want to.

One important issue that comes up for me in thinking about this is the question of resources. Writing some C or perl code and putting it online to share with others, the way free software has been done in the past, doesn’t require a lot of server resources. A service like flickr or gmail clearly is supported by vast networks of storage and computing power. Indymedia, for example, has continually been faced with the difficulty of finding the resources to maintain services like video.indymedia.org (while also developing the software and creating some of the content!). It seems that to do what this document suggests, create free open alternatives to services like flickr, youtube and facebook, what we need is an initiative to create free networks of hosts and develop ways for services to be widely geographically distributed in their hosting, but still fast. This is no easy task. Services like gmail obviously run on clusters that are in the same building, rapidly sharing and accessing data. So not only do we need to start a movement of writing free software for web services, we need a movement of hosting it and developing the ways for that infrastruture to be distributed and still have the quality of existing services. As far as I know, Indymedia hasn’t gotten far in this effort, although its been discussed.

Let’s see what awesomeness autonomo.us comes up with next!