AGPLMail: Taking steps toward Franklin Street Applications

Ben Webb (aka bjwebb) has announced the launch of a project called AGPLMail.

bjwebb has been asking me questions on and off on IRC about starting this project, and I am very glad to see his announcement. He asks in his blog post am I doing something valuable?. My unequivocal answer is yes!

As developers, we have to clone each application that has become a standard in “the Cloud” and make sure there is a Free-as-in-Freedom (FaiF) equivalent. We need readers and signers of the Franklin Street Statement to get to work writing FaiF applications that embody its ideas. That’s the only way we will meet and overcome the challenge of truly distributed network services that respect user freedom and autonomy.

It’s tough to always be playing catch-up, but the Free Software world has shown that we “get there in the end”, and that the final result is something that really respects the freedom of the users. I’m glad bjwebb is taking a stab at the FaiF Web 2.0 mail client, and I hope others will help him make it better.

As a final note, I wanted to point out the admirable humility bjwebb has shown in putting his code out there. What he’s looking for is others to join him on the journey and try to make the application into something interesting. He doesn’t purport to have the answers, but he’s certainly asking the right questions in the best possible way for a developer — putting some code out there under a Free license and asking his peers to give him some feedback!