Toward Free Network Services
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I just wrote a brief blog entry in my SFLC blog about the announcement that Launchpad’s planned license is AGPLv3.
Now that Canonical has made an indication that they want to respect the freedom of network users, it’s very important for the community of users to pay careful attention to Launchpad’s process, to help them make it a user-freedom respecting network service.
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!
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.
So often, a particular strategy becomes dogma. Copyleft licensing constantly allures us in this manner. Every long-term software freedom advocate I have ever known — myself included — has spent periods of time slipping on the comfortable shoes of belief that copyleft is the central catalyst for software freedom.
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.
bkuhn (aka Bradley M. Kuhn) is a member of the autonomo.us group, and is best known for his work in various FLOSS non-profits. He is the inventor of the Affero clause of the AGPL, and currently works at the Software Freedom Law Center and as president of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Jesse Vincent gave a talk at OSCON today entitled Prophet, your path out of the cloud. Every hacker who is interested in implementing a network service that respects the freedom of its users should look at Jesse’s work.
Evan Prodromou is one of the bloggers on autonomo.us. As with most blog posts on the site, the following is his personal viewpoint.
One of the suggestions of the Franklin Street Declaration is for programmers to “[d]evelop software that can replace centralized services.” I’ve taken that suggestion to heart in creating the Laconica microblogging platform, which powers my site Identi.ca. I was using microblogging services a lot, and I wanted to have one that would preserve my autonomy; so I created my own.
I’d like to put forward some suggestions for other Web applications that are ripe for an Open Software Service implementation. These are Web applications that I use on a regular basis. I’d prefer to instead use services that respect my autonomy, and I’m looking forward to a point where I can live my life on-line that way. Here are some services that I use on-line regularly, and that I’d love to have Open alternatives for.
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