Comments on: Software Freedom

By: Links 14/12/2009: Oracle Makes Commitment and Gets EU Pass | Boycott Novell

Links 14/12/2009: Oracle Makes Commitment and Gets EU Pass | Boycott Novell — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:54:10 +0000

[...] Software Freedom We, free (libre, as in freedom) software users are used to prefer open source software over closed source, and I think itâ€™s great, Iâ€™m not going to discuss about that now though, thereâ€™s plenty of literature about that. My concern today is about distributed services (some people call it the cloud if you wish). [...]

By: apol

apol — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:42:27 +0000

I don’t understand what you mean.

By: Wei

Wei — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:31:40 +0000

You want to have your data liberated? Were they under depression from a certain corporation? Did they cry for help???

By: apol

apol — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 15:20:50 +0000

Well, what I know and understand is why would I want to have it liberated.
That there’s no alternative is not a proof for anything.

Having a free client only means that you know what the interface is doing , having an open protocol makes it useful for everyone (note that this is very technical). The point is that a service won’t be free until you can control your data.

By: Wei

Wei — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:51:19 +0000

Before you go on , why don’t you explain why is having a free client and open protocol “not enough freedom” for us??????????

Do you use any searching engine at all????????? Google is not open sourced, bing is not open sourced, Yahoo is not open sourced. I guess they must be “not enough freedom” to you.

(Personally, I also want my own google-search-engine.rpm so I can have my own crawler too! Must be very cool! But, I can understand why they don’t want to open source it too.)

By: apol

apol — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:41:49 +0000

We provide “libre” solutions to the users, we don’t just make users happy, in my opinion.

Creating free software is more than just making users happy during the spare time.

By: afiestas

afiestas — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:33:58 +0000

Well, we (KDE community) accept that kind of services since years ago, for example opendesktop is closed src (afaik), and we’re using it in a lot of places (Even more, his author is a board member). Also “remember the milk” is just a front end to the web service.

Personally I don’t like to use those services, even if they’re opensrc, because you really don’t know how they’re configured. But well, the majority part of KDE accept that services (users at least), so personally I’ll work on improving the interaction between these services and the desktop (kde-silk?), because don’t forget it, we do this for the user (at least I do:)).

By: apol

apol — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:21:30 +0000

But the thing is that it’s us (the free community) the first ones who have to acknowledge that. Companies just will give people what they want.
Of course there are technical issues, but the point here is that there’s more than that.

By: damian

damian — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:29:00 +0000

I agree with most you said, we can’t trust that web services will save our data without looking at it just because the contract says they so.
But if:

- All data that went to/from the server was encrypted/decrypted on the client (an open client)
- And all data was easy to recover in an open format (standard for all services ideally)

Then it could work as I could change to another service whenever I want and even being on the cloud I could conserve my privacy.
yet the 2 above points should be obligatory by law or else who would want to do it.
There should also be libre server software that anyone could put on his own server of course.
this would be a solution to make the cloud be good for everyone but i guess it would be difficult to make the companies accept it