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.
Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol was interviewed this week on linux.com. He talks about his work to get OSI to accept AGPLv3 and why network-service-freedom respecting software licenses are good for his business.
Late last week, the FTP Masters of Debian — who, absent a vote of the Debian developers, make all licensing decisions — posted their ruling that AGPLv3 is DFSG-Free. I was glad to see this issue was finally resolved after months of confusion; the AGPLv3 is now approved by all known FLOSS licensing ruling bodies (FSF, OSI, and Debian).
It was somewhat fitting that the AGPLv3 was approved by Debian within a week of the one year anniversary of AGPLv3’s release. This year of AGPLv3 has shown very rapid adoption of the AGPL. Even conservative numbers show an adoption rate of 15 projects per month. I expect the numbers to continue a steady, linear climb as developers begin to realize that the AGPL is the “copyleft of the Cloud”.
Dirk Riehle has an interesting summary in his blog of Fabrizio Capobianco’s keynote at OSS 2008. Riehle credits Capobianco as the primary catalyst for OSI approval of the AGPLv3. I didn’t realize we owed Capobianco our thanks for that, but I am glad he did that work and wanted to take an opportunity to thank him for it!
One of the things we’re planning for autonomo.us over the next few months is production of a podcast on a monthly basis. We just recorded our first episode on September 18th, the 6-month anniversary of the “mini-summit” meeting that launched the Franklin Street Statement and the autonomo.us group. Many of the original summit attendees called in to talk about the state of Free Network Services and the future of our project.
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.
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