The Road Ahead for Network Freedom

MediaGoblin and last year's campaign

Ran a fundraising campaign from the FSF toward end of 2012.
Success! Paid full time to work (well… for now…)

We had a video… which probably is the best intro we have…

MediaGoblin campaign video!

Computing freedom as a human right

• Software freedom is treated as a nerd issue, even by most of us
• Maybe an anti-ego self defense (fair enough!)
• But as computing gets closer to directly augmenting thought and action, computing freedoms no longer a "nerds rights" issue, but a human rights issue

But mostly just nerds understand it :\

• Outside of hackers and academics, how many people understand what FOSS really means, as an ethical issue?
• Network non-freedom has a network effect
• Freedom for the technically-skilled few, or freedom for society?
• Surely we're in the broader social movement camp!
• Smugness is not the answer

Can we make better resources to improve awareness?

• "Teachable moments" abound
• What if we created materials that explain core principles of free software?
• MediaGoblin campaign video partly an attempt to prove this possible

The mid-2000s->today shift

• Rise of the "web 2.0 world"
• The release of the "mactel" leads to large apple switchover
• Rise in anti-copyleft sentiments
• "Release everything but your secret sauce"
• Anti-copyleft attitude is not mostly coming out of a principled anti-copyright policy, but a "we want to proprietize" strategy (tricky!)

Most devs make the license choices their role models do… So, who are the role models of today's webdev hackers?

Are we in a copyleft crisis? Or an ethical crisis?

Libraries are always more condusive towards permissive licenses

That's okay! We're doing just fine infrastructure-wise

We're really struggling not on the developer-freedom-tooling side, but the user-freedom-tooling side…

People still seem to choose copyleft for web applications

To name a few…

• Wordpress (GPL)
• MediaWiki (GPL)
• CiviCRM (AGPL)
• StatusNet / GNU Social (AGPL) # <- pump.io licensing switch was partly for "become infrastructure" reasons
• Pagekite (AGPL)
• Mailpile (AGPL)
• Diaspora (AGPL)
• MediaGoblin (AGPL) ;)
• Gitorious (AGPL)

In other words

We're struggling with getting polished user-facing software (and in the hands of users)

But when it happens, copyleft seems a common choice

Freedom-aware communities are the antidote

• Build the developer-focused tooling of tomorrow, but with pro-freedom communities
  • Lots of opportunities… but that's another talk…
  • Permissive licensing is probably fine here!
• Build the user-oriented networked appliations of tomorrow (like MediaGoblin? ;))
  • People will probably choose copyleft licenses for these!
  • Free talking point: "I copyleft what you proprietize"
  • There aren't enough polished examples though

Deployment is hard

• Often not packaged, but even if so
• Trend towards language-specific packaging and environments (see Virtualenv)
• Editing application config files, getting about 5 separate application configs in sync

Deployment of free network services: challenging :\

• Most modern web applications
  • Challenging to deploy if not a $LANGUAGE developer
  • But we have to engage it
• Users don't tend to see these issues because companies abstract deployment away. Network freedom doesn't have that luxury!

What about PHP?

• "Sort of" easy, but only if you're using shared hosting
• The things that make it "easy" make it easily exploited
• Shared hosting is dying (good riddance)
• PHP is living in the past, dude

Not just web services! Email is easy, right?

• Email is federated, has been around a long time
• "How hard could it be? Surely a solved problem, I just install a package?"
• "Tell me about your setup, Chris"

We need user-centric config/deployment management

• We need some layers above the packaging world
• Cool things happening in the world of deployment, but they're mostly sysadmin/corporate oriented! (Salt, Puppet, Docker)
• We need to make config/deployment management for people who will never touch a config file
• PaaS? OpenShift???

The silver lining

• The free software desktop used to be hard to run and maintain also
• We need to encourage exploring this frontier until it gets easier
• When things are hard, that's an opportunity to learn cool things
• Bring back the install fest!

The current state of federation

(Note: StatusNet != OStatus; Pump.IO != Pump API)

Why the switch?

• Cleaner
• Easy to understand
• Privacy
• Switch from StatusNet (PHP!) to Node an opportunity to reapproach things

Federation, MediaGoblin, and PyPump

Do we need a "desktop suite" of web applications?

???

But is that it?

Are we calling it quits and leaving the kittens out in the cold?

No!