Mike Linksvayer

Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services launched today.

I’ve written about the subject of this group and statement a number of times on this blog, starting with Constitutionally Open Services two years ago. I think that post holds up pretty well. Here were my tentative recommendations:

So what can be done to make the web application dominated future open source in spirit, for lack of a better term?

First, web applications should be super easy to manage (install, upgrade, customize, secure, backup) so that running your own is a real option. Applications like WordPress and MediaWiki have made large strides, especially in the installation department, but still require a lot of work and knowledge to run effectively.

There are some applications that centralizaton makes tractable or at least easier and better, e.g., web scale search, social aggregation — which basically come down to high bandwidth, low latency data transfer. Various P2P technologies (much to learn from, field wide open) can help somewhat, but the pull of centralization is very strong.

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

• All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
• All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
• All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
• In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Consider all of this ignorant speculation. Yes, I’m just angling for more freedom lunches.

I was honored to participate in a summit called by the Free Software Foundation to discuss these issues March of this year, along with far greater thinkers and doers. Autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement (named for the FSF’s office address) are the result of continued work among the summit participants, not yet endorsed by the FSF (nor by any other organization). Essentially everything I conjectured above made it into the statement (not due to me, they are fairly obvious points, at least as of 2008, and others made them long before) with the exception of making deployment easier, which is mundane, and service governance issues, which the group did discuss, but inconclusively.

There’s much more to say about this, but for now (and likely for some time, at the rate I write, though this activity did directly inspire me to propose speaking at an upcoming P2P industry summit, which I will early next month–I’m also speaking tomorrow at BALUG and will mention autonomo.us briefly–see info on both engagements) I wanted to address two immediate and fairly obvious critiques.

Brian Rowe wrote:

“Where it is possible, they should use Free Software equivalents that run on their own computer.” This is near Luddite talk… It is almost always possible to use an app on your own comp, but it is so inefficient. Networked online apps are not inherently evil, should you back up your work
offline, yes. Should you have alternative options and data portability, yes. You should fight to impove them. But you should not avoid them like the plauge.

The statement doesn’t advocate avoiding network services–see “Where it is possible”, and most of the statement concerns how network services can be free. However, it is easy to read the sentence Rowe quoted and see Luddism. I hope that to some it instead serves as a challenge, for:

• Applications that run on your own computer can be networked, i.e., P2P.
• Your own computer does not only include your laptop and home server, but any hardware you control, and I think that should often include virtual hardware.

Wes Felter wrote:

I see a lot about software licensing and not much about identity and privacy. I guess when all you have is the AGPL everything looks like a licensing problem.

True enough, but lots of people are working on identity and privacy. If the FSF doesn’t work on addressing the threats to freedom as in free software posed by network services, it isn’t clear who would. And I’d suggest that any success free software has in the network services world will have beneficial effects on identity and privacy for users–unless you think these are best served by identity silos and security through obscurity.

Finally, the FSF is an explicitly ideological organization (I believe mostly for the greater good), so the statement (although not yet endorsed by the FSF, I believe all participants are probably FSF members, staff, or directors) language reflect that. However, I suspect by far the most important work to be done to maintain software freedom is technical and pragmatic, for example writing P2P applications, making sharing modified source of network applications a natural part of deployment (greatly eased by the rise of distributed version control), and convincing users and service providers that it is in their interest to expect and provide free/open network services.

I suggest going on to read Evan Prodromou (the doer above) on autonomo.us and the Franklin Street Statement and Rufus Pollock on the Open Software Service Definition, which more or less says the same thing as the FSS in the language of a definition (and using the word open), coordinated to launch at the same time.

A few observations and things learned from the last eight days.

Go to a page with a table, for example this one (sorry, semi-nsfw). Hold down the control key and select cells. How could I not have known about this!? Unfortunately, copy & paste seems to produce tab separated values in a single row even when pasting from mutliple rows in the HTML table (tried with Firefox and Epiphany). Still really useful when you only want to copy one column of a table, but if you want all of the columns, don’t hold down the control key and row boundaries get newlines as they should rather than tabs. (Thanks Asheesh.)

I feel really stupid about this one. I’ve assumed that a (US) Health Savings Account was a spend within the year or lose your contributions arrangement, but that’s what a Flexible Spending Account is (I have no predictable medical expenses, so such an account makes no sense for me). A HSA is an investment account much like an IRA, except you can spend from it without penalty upon incurring medical expenses rather than old age. You can only contribute to a HSA while enrolled in a high deductible health insurance plan, which I’ll try to switch to next year. (Thanks Ahrash.)

I saw a few presentations at LugRadio Live USA, in addition to giving one. Miguel de Icaza’s on Mono (content roughly corresponding to this post) and Ian Murdock’s on OpenSolaris were both in part about software packaging. Taken together, they make a good case for open source facilitating cross polination of ideas and code across operating system platforms.

Aaron Bockover and Gabriel Burt did a presentation/demo on Banshee, showing off some cool track selection/playlist features and talking about more coming. I may have to try switching back to Banshee as my main audio player (from Rhythmbox, with occasional use of Songbird for web-heavy listening or checking on how the program is coming along). Banshee runs on Mono, and both are funded by Novell, which also (though I don’t know how their overall investment compares) has an enterprise desktop linux product.

John Buckman gave an entertaining talk on open source and open content (including the slide at right). My talk probably was not entertaining at all, but used the question ‘how far behind [free/open source software] is free/open culture?’ to string together selected observations about the field.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on Revealing Errors (meant both ways). I found myself wanting to be skeptical of the power of technical errors to expose political/power relationships, but I imagine the concept could use a little hype — there’s definitely something there. The talk made me more sensitive to errors in any case. For example, when I transferred funds from a money market account to checking to pay taxes, an email notice included this (emphasis in original):

Your confirmation number is 0.

Zero? Really? The transaction did go through.

Tuesday I attended the Media Web Meetup V: The Gulf Between NorCal and SoCal, is it so big?, the idea being (in this context pushed by Songbird founder Rob Lord; I presented at the first Media Web Meetup and have attended a few others) that in Northern California entrepreneurs are trying to build new services around music, nearly all stymied by protectionist copyright holders in Southern California. I really did not need to listen to yet another panel asking how the heck is the music recording distribution industry going to use technology to make money, but this was a pretty good one as those go. One of the panelists kept urging technologists to “fix [music] metadata” as if doing so were the key to enabling profit from digital music. I suppressed the urge to sound a skeptical note, as investing more in metadata is one of the least harmful things the industry might do. Not that I don’t think metadata is great or anything.

Wendy Seltzer / CC BY

Thursday evening I was on a ‘Copyright 2.0′ panel put on by the American Society of Media Photographers Northern California. I thought my photo selection for my first slide was pretty clever. No, copyright expansion is not always good for the interests of professional photographers. The other panelists and the audience were actually more open minded (both meanings) than I expected, and certainly realistic. The photographer on the panel even stated the obvious (my paraphrase from memory): new technology has allowed lots of people to explore their photographry talents who would otherwise have been unable to, and maybe some professional photographers just aren’t that good and should find other work. My main takeway from the panel is that it is very difficult for an independent photographer to successfully pursue unauthorized users in court. With the sometime exception of one, the other panelists all strongly advised photographers to avoid going to court except as a last resort, and even then, first doing a rational calculation of what the effort is likely to cost and gain. The best advice was probably to try to turn unauthorized users into clients.

Friday evening I went to San Jose to be on a panel about New Media Artists and the Law. Unlike Thursday’s panel, this one was mostly about how to use and re-use rather than how to prevent use. This (and some nostalgia) made me miss living in Silicon Valley — I lived in Sunnyvale two years (2003-2005) and San Jose (2005-2006) before moving back to San Francisco. Nothing really new came up, but I did enjoy the enthusiasm of the other panelists and the audience (as I did the previous day).

Staturday I went to Ubuntu Restaurant in Napa, which apparently does vegetable cuisine but does not market itself as vegetarian. I think that’s a good idea. The food was pretty good.

I’ve been listening to Hazard Records 59 and 60: Calida Construccio by various and Unhazardous Songs by Xmarx. Lovely Hell (mp3) from the latter is rather poppy.

The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.

Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.

The ultra deluxe success seems to me to validate the encouragement by some to pursue large revenue from rabid fans and collectors willing and able to pay for personalization, authenticity, embodiment, etc., rather than attempting to suppress zero cost distribution to the masses.

Speaking of distribution, click on the magnet to search for a fully legal P2P download of Ghosts, assuming you have the right filesharing software installed.

nin_ghosts_I-IV_mp3.zip (283.7 MB)

There are a number of fun things about a sketch of Uberfact: the ultimate social verifier. The first is that the post could be written without mentioning distributed revision control. The second is that the proposed project is a nice would-be example of political desires sublimated entirely into creating useful and voluntary tools. Third, Mencius Moldbug is a fun writer.

Something like Uberfact should absolutely be built, though I’m far from certain it would hit a sweet spot. It may be too decentralized or too centralized or both. All points from enhancing Wikipedia to the Semantic Web (with Uberfact somewhere between) are complementary and well worth pursuing, particularly if that pursuit displaces malinvestment in politics.

Relatedly, but no time to explain why:

• Imagine decentralizing Wikipedia with Codeville
• Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia
• Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git
• Most important software project
• Free software and social revolution
• We R Independent

A year ago I mentioned Wikileaks, with some skepticism:

Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.

With each new item I read about Wikileaks, usually via Slashdot, my skepticism wanes and hilarity waxes. Bully for Wikileaks, the Wikileaks community, dissidents and transparency worldwide.

Read the Wikileaks article on Wikipedia and Wikileaks:About on Wikileaks, available securely and via many front domains.

Of course Wikileaks is blocked in China, which gives them some cred in my opinion (but note the measurement described in that post doesn’t seem to work anymore — from within the U.S. it appears google.com and google.cn now give identical results).

In one recent item cited on Slashdot, a copyright claim is being used to attempt to censor Wikileaks. How unsurprising.

I’ve written about Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking twice. Watch a five minute video illustrating his ideas.

Side notes possibly only of interest to me: The interviewer is Mark Gorton, founder of LimeWire, and the video is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Unlike recorded music, parking is a rivalrous good. At first approximation, recorded music should be free and parking very expensive. Of course policy is typically backwards.

Via Urban Planning Research.

I’ve complained before here that blog search stinks and isn’t getting better. Now I know why — in addition to blog search being a difficult and expensive service to run — there isn’t much demand. The blog search focused sites I mentioned in the “stinks” post each seem to have gained no traction since then, excepting Technorati, which itself is constantly rumored to be troubled.

A TechCrunch post on traffic at various Google properties finally gave me a clue and an inclination to look at my past posts on blog search. Click through to see a graph showing that Google Blog Search barely registers.

To end on a positive note, perhaps blog search is a good use case for distributed search, as it isn’t economic for a centralized entity to do well. This reminds me, whatever happened to various P2P syndication proposals?

…

Only tangentially related to blog search, I really like Chris F. Masse’s post on blogs vs. newspapers, in which Wikipedia sits at the top of the ecosystem:

So the real winner is Wikipedia — a news and knowledge aggregator… using anonymous volunteers. But Wikipedia is only an information aggregator… it feeds on both media and blogs to gather the facts. Wikipedia is the common denominator of knowledge —not the primary source of reporting. Just like prediction markets feed on polls and other advanced indicators.

I continue to be intrigued by LimeWire’s huge and relatively unsung popularity. According to a December 13 release:

More than one-third of all PCs worldwide now have LimeWire installed, according to data jointly released by Digital Music News and media tracking specialist BigChampagne. The discovery is part of a steady ascent for LimeWire, easily the front-running P2P application and the target of a multi-year Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lawsuit. For the third quarter of this year, LimeWire was found on 36.4% of all PCs, a figure gleaned from a global canvass of roughly 1.66 million desktops.

The installation share is impressive, and unrivaled. But growth has actually been modest over the past year. LimeWire enjoyed a penetration level of 34.1% at the same point last year, a difference of merely 2.3%.

These figures don’t jibe with those supposedly from the same parties from earlier this year, which found LimeWire installed on 18.63% of desktops. A writer on TorrentFreak who has presumably seen the more recent report (US$295, apparently including the requisite section titled “LimeWire Challenged by…Google?”) says:

From the data where the report is based on we further learn that Limewire’s popularity is slowly declining. However, with an install base of almost 18% it is still the P2P application that is installed on most desktop computers. Unfortunately Digital Music News has trouble interpreting their own data, they claim in their press release that it is 36.4%, but that is the market share compared to other P2P clients (shame on you!).

In other open source filesharing application news, Shareaza made its first release in over two years on December 1.

Via Slyck.

The incredibly productive Kragen Sitaker, in Exegesis of “Re: [FoRK] Calling [redacted] and all the ships at sea.”:

The major political issue of today [0] is that music distribution companies based on obsolete physical-media-distribution models (”record labels”) are trying to force owners of new distribution mechanisms, mostly built on the internet, to pay them for the privilege of competing with them; the musical group “The Grateful Dead” used to permit their fans to distribute their music by making copies of taped performances, and most of the money the Dead made came from these performances; it is traditional for performances not to send any revenue to the record label. Long compares the record labels to buggy-whip manufacturers, who are the standard historical symbol for companies who went out of business because of technological change.

This clearly relates to the passage the footnote is attached to, which is about the parallel between Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand” and the somewhat more visible hand that wrote the king’s doom on the wall in Daniel; in this case, the invisible hand has written the doom of the record companies on the wall, and their tears will not wash out a word of it. What this has to do with Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition on seeking symbolism or morals in the book, I don’t know, although clearly Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition relates to mortals hiding messages in texts.

[0] Yes, this means I think this is more important than the struggle over energy, or the International Criminal Court, or global warming, or nuclear proliferation — the issue is whether people should be permitted to control the machines they use to communicate with one another, in short, whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. (Sorry my politics intrude into this message, but I thought “the major political issue of today” required some justification, but needs to be there to explain the context to people reading this message who don’t know about it.)

That will probably seem a pretty incredible claim, but I often agree, and think Sitaker understates the case. Music distribution companies are only one of the forces for control and censorship. The long term issue is bigger than whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. The issue is whether individuals of the later 21st-century will have self-ownership.

LimeWire is supposedly installed on nearly one in five PCs. “Current installation share” for filesharing programs according to BigChampagne and PC Pitstop:

1. LimeWire (18.63%)
2. Azureus (3.43%)
3. uTorrent (3.07%)
4. BitTorrent (2.58%)
5. Opera (2.15%)
6. Ares (2.15%)
7. BitComet (1.99%)
8. eMule (1.98% )
9. BearShare (1.64%)
10. BitLord (1.38%)

It’s a little odd to include all those BitTorrent clients, given their very different nature. All but LimeWire, Ares, eMule, and BearShare are BT-only (their P2P download component — Opera is mainly a web browser, with built in BT support). Recent versions of LimeWire and Ares also support BT, so another provocative headline would be “LimeWire the most popular BitTorrent client?”

Most recent (for surveys publishing numbers in 2007) usage share for Firefox ranges from 11.69% to 14.32%. Of course usage share is very different from installation share (compare Opera installation share above at 2.15% and recent usage share between 0.58% and 0.77%) and P2P filesharing and download clients have different usage patterns, so any comparison is apples to oranges. However, if one could extrapolate from the Opera numbers for installation and usage, LimeWire is not more popular than Firefox.

LimeWire is still impressively popular. This probably is mostly due to open source being less susceptible to censorship than proprietary software (which has a half-life shortened by legal attack in the case of P2P). Still, I’d like to see LimeWire gain more recognition as an open source success story than it typically gets.

The really interesting speculation concerns how computing (and ok, what may or may not have been called Web 2.0) would have been different had P2P not been under legal threat for seven or so years. Subject for another post. We can’t go back, but I think it’s very much worth trying to get to a different version of there.

Yes, I know about significant digits. I’m just repeating what the surveys say.

Jamendo is one of the most interesting music sites on the net (in terms business, community, and technology — there’s no competition yet for the vastness and bizarreness to be found on archive.org, yet). They’re trying every Web 2.0 trick and have somehow managed to avoid becoming overwhelmed with crap. I’ve listened to dozens of the 2,100 albums on Jamendo. While only a small fraction of these have strongly agreed with my taste, just about everything (weighted toward electronica and French rock) sounds professional.

Now Jamendo has introduced an advertising revenue sharing program with participating artists.

Several video sites are attempting variations on this theme (among them Revver, Lulu.tv, and Metacafe), but as far as I know Jamendo’s is the first attempt in the audio space. One might think an audio site would have a harder time making web advertising work than a video site (videos are usually watched within a web page and can have clickable ad areas or bumpers even if not), but I gather that listening via (usually Flash-based) audio players embedded in web pages is increasingly common (and Jamendo upgraded theirs recently), as will be media players that “play” a web page in a browser interface.

One data point: although Jamendo heavily promotes download of high quality copies, primarily via BitTorrent, their statistics indicate that low quality http “streaming” has accounted for more bandwidth. There are many obvious caveats here, but I think all points above indicate that advertising-supported web audio should not be ruled out, even if it is granted that web video has more potential.

Digg Jamendo’s revenue share page.

Wikileaks, currently vapor, may be a joke. If Wikileaks is not a joke and if it successfully exposes a large number of secrets, I’d find it hilarious to see this happening on a public website and without financial incentives. P2P, digital cash, information markets, and crypto anarchy? Nope, just a wiki and a communinty.

Wikileaks FAQ:

WikiLeaks will be the outlet for every government official, every bureaucrat, every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information which the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, WikiLeaks can broadcast to the world.

Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet (1997, but these ideas spread widely in the early 1990s):

One of the most interesting applications is that of “information markets,” where information of various kinds is bought and sold. Anonymity offers major protections for both buyers and sellers, in terms of sales which may be illegal or regulated. Some examples: corporate secrets, military secrets, credit data, medical data, banned religious or other material, pornography, etc.

Why is more information not leaked on the net already? The technology exists to do so anonymously and has for a long time. Why is there not (or to what extent is there) a market for secrets? Again, the technology exists.

Perhaps lack of the relevant institutions in each case. One could email secrets or post to a blog anonymously, but what then? Will anyone notice? One could want to sell secrets, but how to find a buyer?

If Wikileaks succeeds it will be because it will provide, or rather its community will be, the relevant institution. Again from the Wikileaks FAQ:

WikiLeaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.

Instead of a couple of academic specialists, WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility, plausibility, veracity and falsifiability. They will be able to interpret documents and explain their relevance to the public. If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context.

I have not read the Wikileaks email archived at cryptome.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says to dream a little:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

…

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can’t accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and this could do a great deal of good, particularly if the conditions “can’t accomplish on our own…” are stringently adhered to.

However, this is a blog and I’m going to complain.

Don’t fork over money to the copyright industry! This is defeatist and exhibits static world thinking.

$100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same.

But if I were a donor with $100 million to give I’d try really hard to quantify my goals and predict the most impactful spending toward those goals. I’ll just repeat a paragraph from last December 30, Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

Via Boing Boing via /.

Last month I watched The Bridge, a scientology docudrama, after hearing about it on Boing Boing. It is a pretty well done and low key film, considering the nuttiness of scientology.

Copyright is one of the weapons scientology uses to hide the hilarious absurdity of its beliefs, so it is no surprise that The Bridge has has been taken down (at least some of the copies) from YouTube, Google, and the Internet Archive.

I remember that it was published to the Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. Sadly http://www.archive.org/details/BrettHanoverTheBridge is not in the Wayback Machine nor WebCite, so I can’t demonstrate this. If I am correct, the filmmaker has no cause to stop non-commercial distribution, as CC licenses are irrevocable.

If you can’t find the film on the lightnet fire up a filesharing client (I recommend LimeWire) and click on the magnet link below to start your P2P search and download.

Scientology-The_Bridge.mp4

Brief thoughts on last week’s LinuxWorld Conference and Expo San Francisco.

Lawrence Lessig’s opening keynote pleased the crowd and me. A few points fof interest:

• Free speech is a strong aspect of free culture and at least implicitly pushed for a liberal interpretation of fair use, saying that the ability to understand, reintepret and remake video and other multimedia is “the new literacy” and important to the flourishing of democracy.
• The “read/write Internet”, if allowed to flourish, is a much bigger market than the “read only Internet.”
• Support free standards and free software for media, including Ogg and Gnash.
• In 1995 only crazies thought it possible to build a viable free software operating system (exaggeration from this writer’s perspective), now only crazies think wireless can solve the last mile competition problem. Go build free wireless networks and prove the telcos and pro-regulation lawyers (including the speaker) wrong.
• One of the silly video mashups Lessig played was Jesus Will Survive, featuring an adult Jesus in diapers hit by a bus. A few people left the auditorium at this point.

I’ve at least visited the exhibition space of almost every LWCE SF (the first one, actually in San Jose, was the most fun — Linus was a rock star and revolution was in the air) seemed bigger and more diverse, with most vendors pushing business “solutions” as opposed to hardware.

By far the most interesting exhibition booth to me was Cleversafe, an open source dispersed storage project that announced a Linux filesystem interface at the conference and was written up in today’s New York Times and Slashdot. I’ve been waiting for something like this for a long time, particularly since Allmydata is not open source and does not support Linux.

Also, Creative Commons won a silly “Best Open Source Solution” show award.

Addendum 20080422: If you’re arriving from an unhinged RedState blog post, see Lessig’s response.

Luis Villa on my constitutionally open services post:

It needs a catchier name, but his thinking is dead on- we almost definitely need a server/service-oriented list of freedoms which complement and extend the traditional FSF Four Freedoms and help us think more clearly about what services are and aren’t good to use.

I wasn’t attempting to invent a name, but Villa is right about my aim — I decided to not mention the four freedoms because I felt my thinking too muddled to dignified with such a mention.

Kragen Sitaker doesn’t bother with catchy names in his just posted draft essay The equivalent of free software for online services. I highly recommend reading the entire essay, which is as incisive as it is historically informed, but I’ve pulled out the problem:

So far, all this echoes the “open standards” and “open formats” discussion from the days when we had to take proprietary software for granted. In those days, we spent enormous amounts of effort trying to make sure our software kept our data in well-documented formats that were supported by other programs, and choosing proprietary software that conformed to well-documented interfaces (POSIX, SQL, SMTP, whatever) rather than the proprietary software that worked best for our purposes.

Ultimately, it was a losing game, because of the inherent conflict of interest between software author and software user.

And the solution:

I think there is only one solution: build these services as decentralized free-software peer-to-peer applications, pieces of which run on the computers of each user. As long as there’s a single point of failure in the system somewhere outside your control, its owner is in a position to deny service to you; such systems are not trustworthy in the way that free software is.

This is what has excited about decentralized systems long before P2P filesharing.

Luis Villa also briefly mentioned P2P in relation to the services platforms of Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!:

What is free software’s answer to that? Obviously the ’spend billions on centralized servers’ approach won’t work for us; we likely need something P2P and/or semantic-web based.

Wes Felter commented on the control of pointers to data:

I care not just about my data, but the names (URLs) by which my data is known. The only URLs that I control are those that live under a domain name that I control (for some loose value of control as defined by ICANN).

I hesitated to include this point because I hesitate to recommend that most people host services under a domain name they control. What is the half-life of http://blog.john.smith.name vs. http://johnsmith.blogspot.com or js@john.smith.name vs. johnsmith@gmail.com? Wouldn’t it suck to be John Smith if everything in his life pointed at john.smith.name and the domain was hijacked? I think Wes and I discussed exactly this outside CodeCon earlier this year. Certainly it is preferable for a service to allow hosting under one’s own domain (as Blogger and several others do), but I wish I felt a little more certain of the long-term survivability of my own [domain] names.

This post could be titled “freedom needs P2P” but for the heck of it I wanted to mirror “free culture needs free software.”

Luis Villa provokes, in a good way:

Someone who I respect a lot told me at GUADEC ‘open source is doomed’. He believed that the small-ish apps we tend to do pretty well will migrate to the web, increasing the capital costs of delivering good software and giving next-gen proprietary companies like Google even greater advantages than current-gen proprietary companies like MS.

Furthermore:

Seeing so many of us using proprietary software for some of our most treasured possessions (our pictures, in flickr) has bugged me deeply this week.

These things have long bugged me, too.

I think Villa has even understated the advantage of web applications — no mention of security — and overstated the advantage of desktop applications, which amounts to low latency, high bandwidth data transfer — let’s see, video, including video editing, is the hottest thing on the web. Low quality video, but still. The two things client applications still excel at are very high bandwidth, very low latency data input and output, such as rendering web pages as pixels. :)

There are many things that can be done to make client development and deployment easier, more secure, more web-like and client applications more collaboration-enabled. Fortunately they’ve all been tried before (e.g., Java Web Start, JXTA, XUL, others of varying relevance), so there’s much to learn from, yet the field is wide open. Somehow it seems I’d be remiss to not mention XMPP, so there it is. Web applications on the client are also a possibility, though typical web application platforms only address ease of development and not manageability at all.

The ascendancy of web applications does not make the desktop unimportant any more than GUIs made filesystems unimportant. Another layer has been added to the stack, but I am still very happy to see any move of lower layers in the direction of freedom.

My ideal application would be available locally and over the network (usually that means on the web), but I’ll prefer the latter if I have to choose, and I can’t think of many applications that don’t require this choice (fortunately email is one of them, or close enough).

So what can be done to make the web application dominated future open source in spirit, for lack of a better term?

First, web applications should be super easy to manage (install, upgrade, customize, secure, backup) so that running your own is a real option. Applications like WordPress and MediaWiki have made large strides, especially in the installation department, but still require a lot of work and knowledge to run effectively.

There are some applications that centralizaton makes tractable or at least easier and better, e.g., web scale search, social aggregation — which basically come down to high bandwidth, low latency data transfer. Various P2P technologies (much to learn from, field wide open) can help somewhat, but the pull of centralization is very strong.

In cases were one accepts a centralized web application, should one demand that application be somehow constitutionally open? Some possible criteria:

• All source code for the running service should be published under an open source license and developer source control available for public viewing.
• All private data available for on-demand export in standard formats.
• All collaboratively created data available under an open license (e.g., one from Creative Commons), again in standard formats.
• In some cases, I am not sure how rare, the final mission of the organization running the service should be to provide the service rather than to make a financial profit, i.e., beholden to users and volunteers, not investors and employees. Maybe. Would I be less sanguine about the long term prospects of Wikipedia if it were for-profit? I don’t know of evidence for or against this feeling.

Consider all of this ignorant speculation. Yes, I’m just angling for more freedom lunches.

Well over a year ago Sameer Parekh called out an obvious flaw in my argument:

I find it funny when I read technologists arguing that downloads of movies aren’t a problem because they’re slow. When do technologists talk about how technology sucks and isn’t going to improve? When the improvement of that technology hurts their public relations effort!

I noticed Parekh’s blog again recently, which reminded me to respond. I find it interesting (but somewhat tangential) that in the interim centralized web-based video “sharing” (YouTube and many similar sites) has taken off while decentralized P2P filesharing has languished.

Anyhow, I do not argue that P2P filesharing is a waste of time merely because it takes a really long time to download a movie. Even if downloads were instantaneous the experience would be trying. Making it easy and certain for an average user to find a complete copy and find and install the video codecs to be able to watch the copy is not something that improved bandwidth will fix automatically. They are social and software problems, which tend to not improve at the rate bandwidth and similar increase.

In the future when today’s huge downloads are (nearly) instantaneous, they’ll be nearly instantaneous via underground P2P or via centralized download services. The only people who will struggle with the former are the very poor, those who enjoy fighting with their computers, and those who seriously miscalculate the value of their time. Unless the latter are encumbered with DRM so frustrating that there is no convenience advantage to using a centralized service.

By that time I expect most entertainment to be some combination of supercheap, server-mediated and advertising.

The first Creative Commons Salon San Francisco was good, tomorrow’s should be great. Bob Ostertag and Lucas Gonze (who I’ve cited many times) are presenting. I could hardly ask for a better lineup.

Event details.

Update 20060417: Followup post on the CC blog.

It was a pleasure talking to Ostertag before the presentations got underway. Among other things I learned that Pantychrist vocalist Justin Bond has become extremely sucessful. During the presentation he said he had wanted to put his recordings in the public domain but Creative Commons seemed like a good thing to support, so he chose a license rather arbitrarily. Argh! (CC does offer a public domain dedication.) Ostertag pushed the idea that thinking in terms of “copies” is completely obsolete and more or less encouraged “piracy” — in response to a naive questioner asking if streaming and DRM together could stop copying (smiles all around). It was evident during Q&A that he had much more to say coming from a number of different angles. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lucas Gonze’s presentation, though it may have been too much too fast for some people. I found the things he left out of a talk about how the net is changing music notable — nothing about DRM, streaming, P2P, music stores, or podcasting. Hear, hear!

Just noticed that the current LimeWire beta (4.11.0) includes optional copyright filtering. See the features history and brief descriptions for users and copyright owners:

In the Filtering System, copyright owners identify files that they don’t want shared and submit them for inclusion in a public list. LimeWire then consults this list and stops users from downloading the identified files “filtering” them from the sharing process.

If you sign up for an account as a copyright owner you can submit files (with file name, file size, SHA1 hash, creator, collection, description) for filtering. Users can turn the filter on and off via a preference.

LimeWire.org now features a blog with pretty random content. I notice that another PHP Base32 function (which makes a whole lot more sense than the one included in Bitcollider-PHP — I swear PHP’s bitwise operators weren’t giving correct results and worked around that, but was probably insane) is available with a hint that someone is building an “open source Gnutella Server in PHP5.”

Remember that LimeWire is Open Source P2P and thus pretty trustworthy — and you can always fork.