“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.”

“One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control,” he said. “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

Here’s an admittedly overstretched metaphor: I live in a house where I control everything* — the temperature, where the furniture is placed, how much and what kind of food is in the cupboards. I can go in any room in the house whenever I want, and I can change whatever I want. Great.

I wouldn’t want to spend any time in jail. In jail, I have very, very limited freedom, and there are hostile fellow inmates and in some jails interrogations and beatings. It is a really bad place to spend any amount of time.

But I do like to go visit my friends’ and family members’ houses. I don’t have absolute freedom to do whatever I want at their house, but I get to spend time with people I like, enjoy their hospitality, and also see the way other people live for a little while. By having an informal custom of hospitality interchange, I and my friends and social network get to enjoy more of the world than we would just in our own houses.

If friends’ houses were more like jail, I wouldn’t want to go. If a friend told me that I couldn’t talk about politics in her house (say), or another required everyone who visited to be strip-searched at the door, I’d of course not visit (and hopefully would be allowed to leave). But I usually can expect a certain level of autonomy in my person and in my effects that is acceptable and comfortable.

Going places I don’t individually control — restaurants, museums, retail stores, public parks — enriches my life immeasurably. A definition of “freedom” where I couldn’t leave my own house because it was the only space I had absolute control over would not feel very free to me at all. At the same time, I think there are some places I just don’t want to go — my freedom and physical well-being wouldn’t be protected or respected there.

Similarly, I think that using network services makes my computing life fuller and more satisfying. I can do more things and be a more effective person by spring-boarding off the software on other peoples’ computers than just with my own. I may not control your email server, but I enjoy sending you email, and I think it makes both of our lives better.

And I think that just as we can define a level of personal autonomy that we expect in places that belong to other people or groups, we should be able to define a level of autonomy that we can expect when using software on other people’s computers. Can we make working on network services more like visiting a friends’ house than like being locked in a jail?

We’ve made a balance between the absolute don’t-use-other-people’s-computers argument and the maybe-it’s-OK-sometimes argument in the Franklin Street Statement. Time will tell whether we can craft a culture around Free Network Services that is respectful of users’ autonomy, such that we can use other computers with some measure of confidence.

• For hypothetical purposes. My wife and daughter would probably dispute this claim.

Our next episode will be an interview with Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina of Wikia. Wikia is working on a Free and Open Source search engine service, with Open Data. Dubbed Wikia Search, it seems to be the closest thing that we have today to a Free Network Service for search. We’ll be asking Jimmy and Gil about their plans for Wikia Search, the underlying technology, the licensing for software and data, and the involvement of the great Internet community in their project. I’m also interested in their take on Free Network Service businesses, since Wikia is one right now.

The episode after that, we’ll have on Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, to talk about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia is probably the most popular Free Network Service on the Web, and we’ll talk about Brion’s dedication to using 100% Free Software for this massive Web site.

Future episodes? I’d love to talk to folks from Automattic about WordPress.com and their other services. Maybe a round table on the Affero GPL? Distributed programming models? Libre Services?

If you have any questions for our upcoming guests, or you can think of other subjects or topics we should cover in future podcast episodes, drop us a comment here and let us know. We’re interested in exploring the space around Free Network Services and I think we’ve got some interesting discussion ahead of us.

There has been some progress in virtual worlds, particularly with efforts like opencroquet, but more could still be done. Azdel Slade has written some worthwhile and interesting posts about the problem here, here, and here- worth a read!

Copyleft indeed remains a successful strategy in maximizing software freedom because it backs up a community consensus on software sharing with the protection of the law. However, most people do not comply with the GPL merely because they fear the consequences of copyright infringement. Rather, they comply for altruistic reasons: because it advances their own freedom and the freedom of the people around them.

Indeed, it is so important to remember that many of the FLOSS programs we use every day are not copylefted, yet do not actually have any long-term proprietary forks (for me, Subversion, Trac and Twisted come to mind quickly). Examples like this helped me to again re-eradicate some clouded thinking about copyleft as central tenant.

With this mindset fresh, Mike Linksvayer and I had an excellent discussion last month that solidified this connection to network services, and specifically, the licenses for network services software. Many GPL’d network service software give no source to users, but that may have little to do with the authors’ “failure to upgrade” to the AGPL. In other words, the non-source availability of network service applications that are otherwise licensed in freedom is probably unrelated to the lack of network-freedom provisions in the license.

In fact, more likely, the network service world now mimics the early days of the BSD licenses. Deployers are “proprietarizing” by default merely because there is no social effect to encourage release of modified source. Often, they likely haven’t considered the complex issues of network service freedom, and are following the common existing practices. Advent of the GPL did help encourage software sharing in the community, but the general change in social standards that accompanied the GPL probably had a more substantial impact.

Therefore, improved social standards will help improve source sharing in network services. We need to encourage, and more importantly, make it easy for network service deployers to make source of network applications available, regardless of their particular FLOSS license. No existing non-AGPL FLOSS licenses prohibit making the source available to network users. Network providers can and should simply do it voluntarily out of respect for their users. Developers of network service software, even if they do not choose the AGPL, should make it easy for the deployers to give source to their users. I hope to assist in this regard more directly before the end of 2008.