Articles by Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is a researcher, activist, and consultant working on issues of technology, intellectual property, and society. He is currently a researcher and PhD Candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, and a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors. He is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop per Child project. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab.

Chrome OS and Autonomy

July 16, 2009 in Uncategorized by Benjamin Mako Hill | 13 comments

Luis Villa pointed  folks on the Autonomo.us email list to this essay at Free Software Magazine by Tony Mobily. The article title, “Why Google Chrome OS will turn GNU/Linux into a desktop winner,” is a good summary of Mobily’s basic argument.

Although there has been lots of discussion about Chrome OS in the free and open source software communities (e.g. on LWN), its worth qualifying this post by saying that, beyond Google’s announcement, we don’t actually know very much about Chrome OS. But although it is probably an overstatement to suggest (as some have) that Chrome OS will simply boot into a browser, Google is being quite up front about the fact that it is being designed for, “people who live on the web” and will be an environment where, “most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

With the rise of network services, the idea of an operating system that is largely reduced to a web browser is no longer difficult to imagine. Even if one were to limit themselves entirely to Google services, one would have a word processor, spreadsheet, email client, photo management software, chat client, RSS reader, and much more — most of the applications that most people use. As Mobily points out, this means that the details of any operating system begin to matter less. It doesn’t matter if your OS doesn’t have many native programs; if the programs you want run over the web, all you need is a browser.

Mobily argues that Chrome OS will be a win for GNU/Linux on the desktop because Google’s might and market power will help free software succeed where it has struggled in the past. And he might be right. But even if Mobily is completely right and Chrome OS becomes a raging success, it is not at all clear that this will represent a victory of any meaningful sort for software freedom and for users’ autonomy.

Chrome OS is, as it is described, an explicit attempt to build a system that changes where ones computing happens. In doing so, Google is trying to create an OS built around “Software as a Service” that replaces applications a user might run on their own computer with applications that runs on servers outside user control. A Chrome OS user’s computer doesn’t need to be powerful — Google claims that Chrome OS will be ideally suited to low power netbooks — because the user’s computation is happening on Google’s servers instead of the netbook itself.

If switching to Chrome OS means giving up Thunderbird to use GMail, or giving up Openoffice.org to use Google Docs, or giving up Pidgin to use a web-based Google Talk, or giving up Evolution to use Google Calendar, we have reduced the influence and success of the free software desktop, not sealed its victory as Mobily suggests. In a SaaS world, there will be less free software being used and, much more importantly, users will be less free.

With every shift from a piece of free software to a web-based network service, we have moved from a situation where a user had control over his or her software — users’ of “traditional” free software have access to source and have control over the system on which the computer runs — to a situation where users have very little control over their software at all. Google offers no source for the applications that run their web services and, even if they did, they do not offer users the ability to change the software that runs on Google servers.

Chrome OS, or any OS designed around pushing users computation off their computers and onto servers outside of their control is regressive for software freedom. If Chrome OS is, as Mobily suggests, the key to free software’s victory on the desktop, it would be be a ironic and bitter victory indeed.

GitHub, Firewalls, and Freedom

June 9, 2009 in Uncategorized by Benjamin Mako Hill | 4 comments

GitHub has a complicated relationship to software freedom and network services: It is a proprietary centralized service, built using free software, used by many free and open source software projects (and a whole lot of proprietary ones as well) to make using a piece of free software designed to support distributed work on users’ local computers easier.

Last week, Logical Awesome — the company that makes GitHub — announced GitHub:FI (Firewall Install). The new product is designed for those that, “wish to enjoy the benefits of GitHub, but are unable to do so because of corporate restrictions or laws that prevent you from hosting your code with a third-party service.” Essentially, GitHub:FI is a version of GitHub that can be installed on a company’s own computer inside a private network.

The GitHub:FI announcement reveals a number of interesting issues around autonomy and network services. First, the product is a symbol of recognition by GitHub of the business limitations of a purely service-based business. Not everyone will be willing or able to hand their data or computation over to a third-party. GitHub:FI exists to serve a group of people that want a level of autonomy that, while far from Franklin Street Statement style autonomy, is more than the centralized version of GitHub can provide. It marks a guarded step toward increased autonomy by a cloud poster-child.

Second, it’s interesting to see this reluctance to centralized services being described as motivated by organizations under strong institutional pressures — groups like large firms and governments. Although it certainly makes sense that these groups would be reluctant to “outsource” to centralized systems, GitHub:FI shows that these groups may provide an unlikely ally in at least part of the fight for autonomy.

Third, in Logical Awesome’s words, GitHub:FI, “is well over the cost of our most-expensive hosted plan.” In this pricing structure, the distributed option presented in GitHub:FI is framed as a form of tax on autonomy. We suspect there will be much more of this going forward. Of course, as GitHub remains proprietary software, users of GitHub:FI get only buy partial autonomy.

Finally, the product’s name is interesting. Not so long ago, we treated network services as exceptional and local software as normal. The idea of calling distributed software a “firewall install” is an explicit attempt to reframe conceptions of normal and exceptional in terms of where we expect software to reside or, perhaps, a reflection of just how entrenched services have already become.

This post was written with Dafydd Harries.

LibrePlanet Conference March 21-22

February 20, 2009 in conferences by Benjamin Mako Hill | 1 comment

Autonomo.us got started last year the day after the FSF members meeting with the first meeting of the Autonomo.us  team. It was at that meeting that we drafted the first version what would later become the Franklin Street Statement.

We’ve come a long way and this year and we’re helping to celebrate and to plan our future by joining with the FSF to help organize a chunk of the two-day LibrePlanet conference. Unsurprisingly, our chunk will focus on issues around software freedom and network services. A good chunk of the folks that have blogged here are already confirmed their attendance.

Saturday March 21 will be more of a normal conference form and will feature a series of talks by experts on some of the key issues facing free software. Perhaps more exciting though is that on Sunday March 22 there will be an open space style conference with three tracks. One of these tracks is being organized by Autonomo.us members and will be focused on freedom for network services. We’ll raise and tackle the important questions. We’ll try to make connections, think strategically and technically, and plan next steps.

If you are interested in these issues and there is any way you can get to Boston for the conference, please consider making the trip out. There are loads of good people coming. It looks like it will be a blast and may very well be this year’s most important single event for people interested in issues of autonomy and network services.

There’s information on travel, location, hotels, and more on this web page and on this wiki page (login is required to RSVP). And please, spread the word!

Complying with the Franklin Street Statement

October 13, 2008 in administrivia, development, software licensing by Benjamin Mako Hill | 5 comments

Our most important statement to date is the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It calls upon developers, implementors and users of network services to do a series of things to help ensure software freedom for network services.

Now we run a blog, of course, so, in that capacity, we’re one of the implementors our statement speaks to. We use Wordpress with a downloaded theme and a couple extra plugins — all of which are free and available online. We export our blog’s content using RSS and Atom under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License — a licensed approved for Free Cultural Works.

In the Franklin Street Statement, we ask implementors to choose free software for their services. We’ve done that. We ask them to release customizations under a free software license. Like most people who run blogs, we’ve not made any changes, so no action seems to be required. We don’t host any private data other than passwords. Public data on our blog is accessible via RSS and licensed freely.

So are we doing enough to comply with the statement’s guidelines? It seems so. But have we provided an ideal example? Perhaps not. We’ve argued that a free service is one that can be copied, changed and reimplemented by its users. With a little extra work from us, that could certainly be easier with regards to our service.

To work toward being a better example, I’ve put together a new page on our blog that links to local copies of source code for all the software running our blog. In building this list, I made several observations.

While I think many people running blogs would be happy to provide such information, perhaps they won’t be as motivated to take the time I did to put it together. Perhaps we need a plugin to generate such sets of links automatically. Perhaps such a plugin can go further than just RSS by providing database dumps that are automatically and appropriately cleaned of sensitive information like passwords and unpublished posts.

The process of building and auditing the list raised several important issues related to the software we use. The theme we’d been using had unclear and potentially problematic licensing status so I switched to one clearly released under the GNU GPL. It’s not clear to me what to make of the Akismet plugin which, while presumably free itself, uses a separate service and database to do spam checking. The freedom status of this system is much less clear. Now, the whole point of Akismet is build a centralized database resistant to spammers. Should we uninstall Akismet? Possibly. I’m not sure yet, but I hadn’t even considered it before I went through this process.

As more people try to implement the Franklin Street Statement, these types of questions, problems, reports, and shared solutions will help make it easier for others to comply in the future. Other’s who’ve gone through this process and have useful advice, tips, or code to share should contribute that to the Autonomo.us wiki or help write an article on this blog.

First Autonomous Podcast

October 1, 2008 in podcast by Benjamin Mako Hill | 3 comments

About a week ago, on September 18, a subset of the of the folks behind this blog (Evan Prodromou, Bradley Kuhn, Luis Villa, Henry Poole, Mike Linksvayer, and myself, Benjamin Mako Hill) got together for a phone call to mark the the six-month anniversary of the meeting that brought us together to talk about software freedom and network services and that eventually led to the the Autonomo.us blog.

Although our conversation was reflective and unstructured, we left the recorder rolling. I’ve gone ahead and put that recording up, essentially unedited, for anyone that anyone who’d like to listen in on what we had to say to each other.

One concerete outcome of our conversation was a decision to do these types of podcasts more in the future. We’ll invite guests who are active and involved in thinking about and taking action on issues related to software freedom and network services, we’ll get hear from them, and we’ll talk to them about the issues as a group.

We hope our next one to be up in less than a month with a guest that’s still to be finalized. You can listen to or download the first podcast in OGG vorbis format now.

Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services

July 14, 2008 in statements by Benjamin Mako Hill | 89 comments

The current generation of network services or Software as a Service can provide advantages over traditional, locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations. This move toward centralization has powerful effects on software freedom and user autonomy.

On March 16, 2008, a workgroup convened at the Free Software Foundation to discuss issues of freedom for users given the rise of network services. We considered a number of issues, among them what impacts these services have on user freedom, and how implementers of network services can help or harm users. We believe this will be an ongoing conversation, potentially spanning many years. Our hope is that free software and open source communities will embrace and adopt these values when thinking about user freedom and network services. We hope to work with organizations including the FSF to provide moral and technical leadership on this issue.

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First Steps Toward Free Network Services

May 12, 2008 in administrivia by Benjamin Mako Hill | No comments

Recently, the FSF convened a meeting to discuss the questions for network services and the issues that they pose for software freedom. The description of the event said:

The last decade has witnessed a rise in the role of computing as a service, a massive increase in the use of web applications, the migration of personal computing tasks to data-centers, and the creation of new classes of service-based applications. These shifts have raised a host of important questions for the advocates of free software. For example, by separating use and distribution of software, these models have in some cases reduced the effectiveness of GNU GPL-style copyleft which treat modified web applications as if they were private software. Much more importantly, the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

What does freedom mean for the users and developers of web services? What is at risk? What should the free software community, and the Free Software Foundation, do to ensure that software, and its users, stay free in this new technological environment?

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