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!

“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.

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!

I think that SxSW is a potentially very friendly crowd where network services and cloud computing are a hot topic and Free and Open Source software are favourably considered. It’s a great place for us to be challenging the conventional wisdom that freedom and autonomy aren’t important “in the cloud”.

Ideally the panel would comprise members of the autonomo.us group, other people interested in autonomy and software-as-a-service, and maybe some dissenters to make the whole thing interesting.

If you’re interested in user autonomy, the Franklin Street Statement, and Open Software Services, please take a few moments to register for the Panelpicker and vote for the above panel. Tell your friends, colleagues, and neighbors, vote early, vote often! Thanks!

Social bookmarking is a pretty crowded field on the Web, with delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us) taking the greatest amount of mindshare, although I have no idea if they’re still holding the majority of the market. The increased use of bookmarking tool aggregators like ShareThis show that the gaggle of bookmarking sites is a little confusing for everyone. In this kind of market, taking the Free Network Service road is a great chance to differentiate.

I hope that the plan to make their “next version”, dubbed “M2″, Free Software doesn’t devolve into never making the software Free and Open Source. I also hope they review carefully the Open Software Service Definition and consider making ma.gnolia.com an OSSD-compliant site. Ma.gnolia.com already allows users to apply a Creative Commons license to their bookmark stream, although they default to the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike which doesn’t meet the Free Cultural Works Definition. I think they should consider long and hard how to make all data (except data the user marks as private) Open Culture.

What I find most heartening is the M2 project charter (PDF, 190KB), which shows they’ve really thought through the distributed nature of the software. As I mentioned with identi.ca, making a social networking site’s software Open Source is an empty gesture if people on different servers can’t connect socially. It looks like M2 will have ways to aggregate various M2 instances together, and even aggregate the aggregators.

Good luck to Ma.gnolia.com on this project. I hope they can rally a community around it, reach out to other Open Source bookmarking projects to implement a common distributed protocol, and generally just rock out. A Free Network Service for social bookmarking would be an excellent addition to an open software services ecology.

When you talk about “social software”, what do you mean?

Perhaps the crux of it is – social software alows people to interact with each other online in ways similar to their Real World interactions – with just a bit more wiring involved.

What’s the problem with social software that you’re trying to solve?

DiSo is a cleverly shortened form of “distributed social” – the idea that surely we can build ways for any site to participate in this “new” social web. The other way to look at this is one I really like: we’re pushing control of the social data out to the edges, as Danny O’Brien likes to phrase it. While total user control over this data may or may not be ultimately attainable, I think that working towards that goal is a good counterbalanace to the centralization that is prevalent in the silos.

What is the DiSo Project?

How is it trying to solve the problem(s) with social software?

DiSo got started from some hacks I did to the WP Microformatted Blogroll plugin for WordPress that Chris Messina (DiSo co-founder and Agent Provocateur) had written nearly a year before. I was reading about some work that the DIG (Distributed Information Group) had done with FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) and OpenId to create what we’d today call a social whitelist – I looked at that and thought I could do something similar with XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and OpenID. So I downloaded Chris’s plugin (GPL’d yay) and got to hacking. That work got rewritten a couple times, and now lives (I think!) in the wp-contacts-list plugin in the DiSo repository.

So, for contacts the foundation was XFN. Core to these interactions is Identity – for that we build on OpenId. In looking at Profiles, we have the hCard microformat, a convenient format that’s both human- and machine-readable. Messaging is trickier – regardless of implementation, there’s a real-time expectation from users there that we need to address. There’s a lot of interest in eXtensible Message Passing Protocol (XMPP) (the protocol used in Jabber chat and Google’s gTalk, AtomPub, and a few others, including Laconica (cue subtle suck-up to interviewer).

Tell us about yourself. Who are you? What’s your background? What’s your principal role at DiSo?

My earliest experience with the internet and the web up close was a the linux web/mail server I watched our ISP guy build for the agency I was working with at the time, around 1997. This idea that anyone could download this entire operating system, with programs, for free and install it on  commodity hardware was completely new for me, and Free Software was indelibly linked to the Web in my mind from that day. Now, this is coming from a die-hard Macintosh user, but my first web programming was in perl and msql, and I’ve always advocated for Free technologies where it seemed to make any sense.

Roll forward a few years, and I got interested in standards-based development in general, and involved in the microformats community in particular; it was my first experience with community-driven standards. The DiSo community is sort of modeled on the microformats community – it’s very adhoc. Chris and I are the co-founders, list moms, wiki gardeners, and askers-of-questions, and there are a few prolific coders who are investing time and energy in producing some complex bits of code. I’ve done my share of coding, but the day job means I don’t get as much time as I’d like. My most recent contributions are an XRDS-Simple plugin for Movable Type, and a fairly complex and (if I may deign to say, cool) Friends plugin for Movable Type. The Friends plugin lets you manage a Friends/Contacts list on your own site, will display a blogroll for your site, and uses the Google social graph api to provide some powerful discovery, import, and merging of contacts from other social networking sites.

How many people are working on the project right now? What are they doing?

The unsung hero of DiSo though has to be Stephen Weber. Stephen’s a coding machine, and participates in a lot of the discossions on the list, championing simple approaches when some of us start wandering off into the weeds. Stephen has done the majority of work on activity streams, profiles and permissions (something Stephen and I hacked on, and he fleshed out, that came out of the OpenId whitelist work early on). Recently Stephen built a very very cool social search engine that crawls hCards, FOAF, and XFN data via the social graph api. He’s now got over 100k profiles indexed, including contacts for each profile. It’s simple but very powerful.

There are others that have worked on code for various platforms, and there’s been a ton of really good discussion on the list. I’d call out James Walker of Lullabot who wrote an XRDS-Simple plugin for Drupal; Mark Paschal wrote the original Action Streams plugin for Movable Type, of which Stephen’s action streams plugins was a straight port. Technically, either projects are part of DiSo (i.e. in the repo) but both Mark and James participate on the list and have encouraged our work.

Your first release is based on WordPress. Why did you choose it for the initial rollout?

1. Chris’s initial plugin was built for WordPress, and we both used WordPress for our personal sites.
2. WordPress is really popular among hobbyists and web-savvy families, it can be hosted damn near anywhere, and it represents kind of a lowest common denominator platform.
3. It’s got a well-ish documented plugin api that provides access to near everything in the app.

Where does DiSo stand in relation to open standards around identity — for example, OpenID? MicroID?

I hope any MicroId proponents out there will correct me if I’ve misjudged.

Compare and contrast DiSo with some other open social efforts — XFN? FOAF? OpenSocial?

Open Social is always on the radar, sort of over there to the left. Personally, I kind of like what Google is doing there, but it’s not what I would call distributed. It’s more like tether-ball. You can play all around the silo but you still can’t really take your ball and go home if you get your nose bloodied (to violent a metaphor?). Friend Connect (Facebook) is the same. Now, Kevin Marks is probably going to set me straight on something I’ve got wrong about Open Social, and that’s ok. I’d like to see DiSo code talking to Open Social, but it’d be easy to get sucked into that ecosystem before we’ve got a solid one of our own.

Are you familiar with NoseRub? AroundMe? What’s your impression? How could they use DiSo, or interoperate?

Are there other interesting projects you’ve got your eye on right now?

What can users or developers do to help with DiSo?

To be honest, we’re not as close to having something for users to play with as I’d like. Developers or technical users, yes – there are quite a few components you can get from the repository and install on a site to test things out. But not much I’d point my wife at yet. The upcoming MT Friends plugin for is going to be the most complete piece I’ve worked on so far, and I’d probably set that up for a friend or fmaily member, but it’s hard to say “this is DiSo!”. It’s a small piece of the whole.

Where do you see DiSo in a year? 5 years?

Some people have confused what autonomo.us is doing with what DiSo is doing. How would you compare the two?

With this focus on principles, rather than code, we think we complement- rather than compete with- projects like DiSo, DataPortability, and Open Web Foundation. We’re not ivory tower types; every one of us has an extensive development background, so we all have the deepest respect for the people writing code (and specs), and no desire to get in their way.

I think the shared principles have to do with pushing Control of data, interactions, etc out to the Edges. For autonomo.us, the Edge means the desktop, and Control means Free and Open software that cannot be taken away at a corporation’s whim. For DiSo, the Edge is a web presence under the user’s control, and Control means Free and Open Services that can be replicated/federated at need. But that’s just a stab at a comparison – it’d be fun to get together sometime and talk about the parallels.

How do you think autonomo.us can help DiSo?

What comes next with distributed sociality on the Web, in your opinion? Where are we going?

What comes next for you personally?

Some choice quotes:

What good are free and open source licenses, all based on the act of software distribution, when software is no longer distributed but merely performed on the global network stage?

… companies are beginning to understand that in the era of the cloud, open source without open data is only half the application.

if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized.

Free Software + Free Data + Open Protocols ➔ Autonomy

It was brave of Tim to take this stand. Few people in the Web 2.0 biz are going to be excited about this direction for software services. Nobody wants to be told to open up, or get routed around by the FLOSS community. A lot of software companies have responded to the growth of Open Source software by moving to a software-as-a-service model, and they’re not going to like hearing that they’re going to be facing competition on that level, too.

To be fair, Tim takes a perspective that’s been different from ours here at autonomo.us. He argues mostly in economic terms: that “lock in” is bad for companies and limits choices. Which is true, but doesn’t really focus on freedom of choice for the individual. That said, I think it’s probably a good argument in general, and I think that a lot of companies that have based their business on a single “open” SaaS platform (cough cough) know that this kind of lock-in is a really bad thing.

Mostly, I’m glad we’re seeing a diversity of people in the Free and Open Source software community expressing their concerns on this matter. I know it might be asking a lot, but I hope that Tim gives the Franklin Street Statement a once-over and considers endorsing it.

Rather than spending their time on grandiose statements, the DiSo Project and others like are already distributing code that just works. … [T]he web moves much faster than desktop software and it remains to be seen if the principles of desktop software can guide the development of an open web.

We’re actually in agreement with Wired here, though Wired hasn’t realized it yet autonomo.us is very explicitly about the idea that “the principles of free/open desktop software” can’t guide the development of an open web. If it could, FSF and OSI would already have been on their respective warpaths about this years ago. Instead, those principles- especially where they focus on user freedom- will probably be relevant, but also almost certainly insufficient and sometimes nonsensical. If the old principles only partially work, there must be some other principles that can guide the development of an open web. I think we see our primary goal as understanding what these new principles are, so that we can work with other groups to forward them.

With this focus on principles, rather than code, we think we complement- rather than compete with- projects like DiSo, DataPortability, and Open Web Foundation. We’re not ivory tower types; every one of us has an extensive development background, so we all have the deepest respect for the people writing code (and specs), and no desire to get in their way. While those guys and gals charge ahead doing the hard and important work- probably stumbling in some places and hopefully succeeding brilliantly in others- we’ll be watching their successes and failures, and thinking and writing about the philosophy, the principles, and the big picture. Our hope is that this will help inform and frame the discussion, so that we can all focus on advancing software autonomy instead of reinventing philosophical wheels.

To put it another way- we don’t expect to write code (though individual members or their affiliated groups have written code and will continue to.) We do expect that when concerned code writers are wrestling with what their code or specs should do, we’ll be able to help answer their questions about principles and goals.

Luis is a law student at Columbia Law School; a director of the GNOME Foundation; a member of OSI’s legal advisory board; and many other hats. This post is not a formal statement of GNOME, OSI, or any other organization of which I’m a part- even autonomo.us- just a reflection of my understanding of the state of our little project here.