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. Just as bad, it strikes me as a fairly large and self-sustainable business opportunity- a small but growing number of people are willing to pay for services which give them the kind of control that flickr and others can’t or won’t give. Further, 37 Signals and other things has convinced me that it is possible to build small, basically self-financed web businesses. We now have millions of GNOME users out there; just 100,000 (hell, 10,000) GNOME users paying $5 a month for hardware, bandwidth and some software would finance a lot of software development. So I believe firmly there is a big opportunity out there for someone to do a free software based for-pay web service that integrates well with tools like f-spot, gnome-blog, evo, gossip, ekiga, nautilus, etc. It should be easy for GNOME users to sign up for one account, pay a small monthly or yearly fee, and be able to easily (no further configuration) publish their photos, blogs, etc., and communicate via email/jabber/voip/etc. Could be a small for-profit (like 37 Signals) or it could be the funding source for the first free-software cooperative. Either way, the opportunity is there for someone to do some agile, rapid development and have this in place soon.
Luis Villa’s Blog » guadec thoughts #3: where is .gnome?
This is too something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. We have an awesome operating system for all areas of computing but when it comes to social interactions over the internet I don’t particularly want to go through proprietary lines of communication that I cannot trust.
Since the O’Reily guys coined the term Web 2.0, there has been an explosion of awesome new technologies that you and I can make use of. To name some of them, off the top of my head: del.ic.ious, Flickr, all the blogger portals (ie. Blogger, MSN Spaces, …), Last.fm, Facebook, Livejournal, Hi5 and so and so forth. But the problem is I don’t want to use a free software operating system and the operate through proprietary lines of communication over the Internet for an integral part of my online socialising. In fact this is the main reason why I have not signed up to a Flickr account.
15 years ago we needed a free software operating system. Back then we did not check our email, chat to friends, write to our blogs and upload photos of our good times. Now with the Internet - the single largest and most efficient communication network in human history - we really need to make sure we also have free software online services that allow it’s users to socialise and communicate freely, again just like with free/open source software not just in terms of free beer but also in terms of free speech.
I certainly won’t be looking at the code of a free blogging portal. That is not the most important part in this. The integral part of the need for free oneline services is an issue of trust - an issue of where does your data go - an issue of who does what with the information of your online activities, an issue of your privacy and and rights to your content.
technorati tags:web-2.0, technology, GNU, Internet, blog, socialising, social-networks
4 comments
Hi!
I find this a bit confusing. You talk about how Flickr is not OSS, and that therefore you don’t have an account. But then you talk about how the real issue is your privacy and trust. I don’t really understand how the two are related.
How does a Website’s privacy policy relate to whether their backend is OSS? To phrase this question another way, how is Flickr, to use this specific example again, with its easy-to-find privacy policy (to summarise: “We won’t spam you but we sometimes set cookies”) and clear-cut intellectual property policy (“You own all rights to your photos”), more confusing or suspicious in this regard because you can’t download the software that is running it?
I’m sure that I am missing the point here, because no matter what the backend is, if you are uploading data to someone’s server, you need a clear-cut agreement as to who owns what, regardless of the nature of the code running the site.
Sorry, the Flickr example doesn’t work well in this. There are a few other reasons as to why I currently don’t have an account with Flickr - or rather I should say Yahoo! Inc. - and I guess they all sort of add up to the point where I say I could do without it.
All of the service providers - well almost all (*cough: MSN Spaces*) - have reasonably decent privacy and IP terms and policies that aren’t usually too long to read. However to me also comes down to the point that I am using a service provided to me by some company rather than by a community project run by the people, for the people. I guess my more socialist views come to play there.
I’d really like to see a blogging network brought to us on free software, top to bottom with privacy and terms of use/service policies giving maximum rights to the users and only taking anonymous statistical data for any possible use. I suppose to the very large majority of people the idea for something like this wouldn’t manifest itself for more than half a minute if at all because they couldn’t care less but I suppose I have a discontent for a lot of the services brought to use by commercial groups seeking ultimately to make a profit - not that this is a bad thing - I just would like to see a community run service.
Nah, it was me. I didn’t mean to draw such a hard connection between the terms of use / privacy policies of a service and the backend technologies.
Definitely.
Thanks for pointing out where I messed up. :)
Integrating webservices into gnome… Anyone remember a company named Eazel? I guess it was six years too early.
Interesting company - they made Nautilus 1.0.
I guess if I was for this web thing - which I am - it would however have to be desktop independant and not discriminate against the users of proprietary software. The three chief goals are to be operated on free software, by the community for the community and cater for free software users.
That’s the idea I guess - might be something for me sometime down the track… ;)