October 2008

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Capobianco Delivers Pro-AGPLv3 keynote at OSS 2008

October 22, 2008 in fellow travellers by bkuhn | 1 comment

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!

cloud(s) and hype at Freedom to Tinker

October 14, 2008 in Uncategorized by luis | No comments

Following in Evan’s footsteps, I’ve written a post on clouds and hype over at Freedom To Tinker. The nutshell is that there are different types of clouds, and we should be keeping that in mind instead of treating all clouds as either good or bad. But head over there for the full story.

Complying with the Franklin Street Statement

October 13, 2008 in administrivia, development, software licensing by mako | 5 comments

Our most important statement to date is the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It calls upon developers, implementors and users of network services to do a series of things to help ensure software freedom for network services.

Now we run a blog, of course, so, in that capacity, we’re one of the implementors our statement speaks to. We use Wordpress with a downloaded theme and a couple extra plugins — all of which are free and available online. We export our blog’s content using RSS and Atom under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License — a licensed approved for Free Cultural Works.

In the Franklin Street Statement, we ask implementors to choose free software for their services. We’ve done that. We ask them to release customizations under a free software license. Like most people who run blogs, we’ve not made any changes, so no action seems to be required. We don’t host any private data other than passwords. Public data on our blog is accessible via RSS and licensed freely.

So are we doing enough to comply with the statement’s guidelines? It seems so. But have we provided an ideal example? Perhaps not. We’ve argued that a free service is one that can be copied, changed and reimplemented by its users. With a little extra work from us, that could certainly be easier with regards to our service.

To work toward being a better example, I’ve put together a new page on our blog that links to local copies of source code for all the software running our blog. In building this list, I made several observations.

While I think many people running blogs would be happy to provide such information, perhaps they won’t be as motivated to take the time I did to put it together. Perhaps we need a plugin to generate such sets of links automatically. Perhaps such a plugin can go further than just RSS by providing database dumps that are automatically and appropriately cleaned of sensitive information like passwords and unpublished posts.

The process of building and auditing the list raised several important issues related to the software we use. The theme we’d been using had unclear and potentially problematic licensing status so I switched to one clearly released under the GNU GPL. It’s not clear to me what to make of the Akismet plugin which, while presumably free itself, uses a separate service and database to do spam checking. The freedom status of this system is much less clear. Now, the whole point of Akismet is build a centralized database resistant to spammers. Should we uninstall Akismet? Possibly. I’m not sure yet, but I hadn’t even considered it before I went through this process.

As more people try to implement the Franklin Street Statement, these types of questions, problems, reports, and shared solutions will help make it easier for others to comply in the future. Other’s who’ve gone through this process and have useful advice, tips, or code to share should contribute that to the Autonomo.us wiki or help write an article on this blog.

Autonomo.us discussion list

October 13, 2008 in Uncategorized by Mike Linksvayer | No comments

Autonomo.us now has a public discussion list. Sign up for discuss@lists.ibiblio.org.

A reminder about other modes of communication:

Social News

October 2, 2008 in development by evan | 10 comments

Social news Web sites have become a staple of many people’s Web experience. Examples include Reddit, Digg, Mixx, Yahoo! Buzz and Propeller. In my opinion, a flagship free network service for social news could be an important part of an open software services ecology.

The Wikipedia article on social news redirects to social bookmarking, which I think is incorrect. Here’s my description: on a typical social news site, users submit URLs for Web sites, images, videos, or news articles. Other users comment on and rate the URLs — usually a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote. Submitted URLs with the highest ranking are shown on the social news site’s front page, and users may also have “personalized” front pages that include only URLs recommended for them. Typically (not always) there’s a social network involved, such that a friend’s submissions or votes matter more than a stranger’s in recommending links for the user.

Digg, in particular, has become an important arbiter of popularity on the Web in 2008. Getting a new link “dugg” and ranked highly, or even put on the front page, can be a make-or-break driver of traffic for bloggers and other site owners. The once-famed Slashdot effect is now dwarfed by Digg’s ability to send traffic to a new site.

There are, of course, some serious downsides. The algorithms for ranking submitted links on most social news sites are proprietary. Data on URLs’ popularity, voting records, the social network itself and the profiles of users on the service is typically put under a strict no-reuse policy (Digg’s public domain dedication being a notable and refreshing exception) and is usually hard to retrieve in bulk. Finally, no current social news site supports a distributed model, e.g. cross-site voting or “friending” protocols.

Software

All of which makes the social news a ripe market for an Open Software Service to move into. There are several Free and Open Source social-news packages available for download. Here are a few notable ones:
  1. Slynkr. This Apache-licensed package drives Sun’s interesting but little-used SDN Share site. Slynkr has a good professional look, but my guess is that its dependence on Java technology is inhibiting its spread on the Web. Getting cheap Java hosting is just not that easy today.
  2. Reddit. A site once neck-and-neck with Digg, but with flagging popularity, Reddit released its source under the CPAL. Reddit’s software, written in Python, has stood the test of time, and has undergone a lot of revisions based on feedback from the site’s active users. reddit.com also supports a Unfortunately, Reddit didn’t follow through with a release of its data under an Open Data license — all data is under a no-lookee-no-touchee personal-use-only user agreement. It would be interesting to see if Reddit can take this important next step and become a real Open Software Service.
  3. Menéame is a fairly popular (Alexa rank: 6878) social news site in Spanish. Its software is available under the old AGPL, and all contents are licensed under the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Spain. As far as I can tell, Menéame is a model Open Software Service, and I strongly suggest its use for Spanish-speaking Web users. The main downside I see is that the software doesn’t seem to support any distributed sociality, so each new installed version will be isolated from existing sites.
  4. Pligg (sounds like…) was originally started as an English-language fork of Menéame, but has been under heavy development for the last two years and is probably at this point significantly more mature than its ancestor. However, the software remains under the old AGPL (ah, copyleft…), although the status of add-on packages in the Pligg Pro shop is kind of mysterious. In any event, the really slick interface (see the interactive demo) and active dev community make Pligg a natural go-to for an Open Software Service. However, no clear leader for a general-purpose social news site using Pligg has come forward, and those that do exist (see http://pliggsites.com/ or Ten Pligg Sites Worth Visiting) don’t typically have an Open Data license. And, again, distribution across installed sites hasn’t happened yet.
  5. sux0r.org is a brand new piece of software, AGPL-licensed, and the default license for shared data on the site is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. It’s got a lot of interesting features, including Bayesian classification of submissions, and I think it’s worth a close watch.

Next moves

What could a social news site (or sites) that works well in an Open Software Services ecology look like? First, it’s probably clear that a single leader is necessary, to get the kind of traffic numbers that will drive people to submit and rank stories. Second, it will have to leverage its Open Source software with a networked voting system, such that adding more services to the site will stimulate a network effect. Letting groups and users create their own sites that use the same software, but feed data and users into the rest of the network, would really grow the project and make it more valuable.

I encourage anyone interested in helping to move forward Free Network Services to look into this problem. Just installing Pligg or Reddit and adding liberal data-sharing provisions is going to be a big win. (If it was me, I’d scrape that nice public-domain data from Digg, too. Why not?) The distributed social news problem is a hard one, but ultimately (I think) necessary to the project.

First Autonomous Podcast

October 1, 2008 in podcast by mako | 2 comments

About a week ago, on September 18, a subset of the of the folks behind this blog (Evan Prodromou, Bradley Kuhn, Luis Villa, Henry Poole, Mike Linksvayer, and myself, Benjamin Mako Hill) got together for a phone call to mark the the six-month anniversary of the meeting that brought us together to talk about software freedom and network services and that eventually led to the the Autonomo.us blog.

Although our conversation was reflective and unstructured, we left the recorder rolling. I’ve gone ahead and put that recording up, essentially unedited, for anyone that anyone who’d like to listen in on what we had to say to each other.

One concerete outcome of our conversation was a decision to do these types of podcasts more in the future. We’ll invite guests who are active and involved in thinking about and taking action on issues related to software freedom and network services, we’ll get hear from them, and we’ll talk to them about the issues as a group.

We hope our next one to be up in less than a month with a guest that’s still to be finalized. You can listen to or download the first podcast in OGG vorbis format now.