With Software As a Service,
Is Only the Network Luddite Free?

Bradley M. Kuhn

Saturday 21 February 2009

In The Beginning …

• There was a computer.

• There were terminals.

• There were users.

• … and the users had freedom.

Ye Ol’ Four Freedoms

• to learn.

• to copy and share.

• to modify.

• to share modified versions.

… Then Freedom Eluded Us

• They built licensing walls.

• By separating the software from the computer.

• Who Invented Licensing?

Who Invented Licensing?

Hai Hobbyists! Softwearz gived free-domes, but I ated them.

• Gates convinces IBM to license rather then acquire DOS.

Who Fixed this Problem?

Who Fixed this Problem?

RMS: My Old Boss

• Job at MIT’s AI lab in late 1970s and early 1980s.

• Programming their PDP–10!

• In the Golden Age.

MIT AI Lab: The Golden Age

• academic computing.
• software sharing.
• no licenses!

MIT AI Lab

MIT changed.

MIT AI Lab

patents == $$$

MIT AI Lab

spin-offs == $$$

GNU

• Changes the world.

• For the user of individual computers.

• No reason now not to have freedom on your own machine.

Internet changes little (to start)

• Client/Server computing.

• Freedom implications are basically the same.

• Example: The Email System.

Email: The MTA

• Yours has freedom: (postfix, exim, sendmail).

• Plenty of proprietary ones: (exchange).

• RFCs define interoperability.

• We reverse-engineer RFC-less protocols: (OpenChange).

• UR SERVERZ CAN HAS FREE-DOMES.

Email: The MUA

• Yours has freedom: (Thunderbird, mutt, Gnus)

• Plenty of proprietary ones: (outlook)

• UR CLIENTZ CAN HAS FREE-DOMES.

What changed?

• The Browser as application delivery platform.

• AJAX.

• Whose computing is done where?

• Computing in the Cloud.

• Stall-menz gived u free-domes, but Cloud ated them.

Email becomes Gmail

• “The experience”

• Effectively: Thin Client.

• Mixes Up Free again: Price vs. Freedom.

• RFCs no longer enough.

• We’re back to proprietary “lock-in”.

Users and “The Cloud”

Users and “The Cloud”

Even Worse Than Proprietary Apps and OS’es

Meanwhile, My Old Boss Says …

“[Cloud Computing] is stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign.”

• That’s his way of telling the next generation to deal with challenge.

• What’s that challenge?

What’s The Challenge?

• Not merely a question of code and licensing.
  • Although that’s part of it (more later).

• A question of community source+data control.

• Power to transport: applications, data, human connections.

• Autonomy: of code, of data, of community.

How Do We Start?

• Infrastructure that respects freedom.

• Empower the user: give them all the code.

Can’t Stop There

• User communities need ability to transplant.

• Reclaim your data; relocate your community.

• This is tough programming.

Projects to Look At

• Evan Prodromou’s identi.ca (laconi.ca).
  • Microblogging: (Follow me there: ‘bkuhn’)

• Jesse Vincent’s Prophet.

• Yourselves.
  • make it even easier for developers to respect freedom.

License To Look At

• Affero GPL.

• Extends copyleft to network service world.

• Handles the code side well.

Techniques to Look At

• Deployed applications auto-give users source.

• Data is downloadable in community-chunks.

“Future” of the Cloud

• Disjoint but Integrated.

• Portable and Autonomous.

• Developers decide next direction.

• Ask the question in Cloud projects:
  • Are we respecting the users’ freedom and autonomy?

• The data is theirs; we are their custodians.

More Info and This Talk’s License

More Info? See: http://autonomo.us/

This talk and the slides are

Copyright © 2008, 2009, Bradley M. Kuhn.

These slides, this talk, and audio/video recordings thereof are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.