You hardly hear from him but when you do it is pretty profound. It was a similar manifesto which launched the D-Bus project and inspired David Zeuthen to write HAL. Go, go, go mugshot team. GNOME should really get onboard.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]April 3, 2007
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I appreciate Havoc very much, but this manifesto is total crap as you really shall not put your private stuff online – in opposition what Web 2.0 companies tell you and in opposition what stupid kids obviously not getting enough love from their parents do.
Comment by Mathias Hasselmann — April 4, 2007 @ 1:30 am
I just thought the same thing when read his post this morning!
Comment by tm — April 4, 2007 @ 2:31 am
(i mean the silent Bob thing)
Comment by tm — April 4, 2007 @ 2:32 am
Mathias,
Now there is some danger to being more open and trusting data to other people, but isn’t that what we do every day as Free and Open Source developers? My code, an expression of myself is propigated for free everwhere, my e-mail is published by dozens of mailing lists, my blog syndicated on at least four sites I know of, my name searchable in google and my image plastered in various places on the net. I am public and I think there are those who feel it useful to be so. I think the world is becoming more free and open and that is a good thing as I belive it will breed more understanding. As anything else we must learn how to survive in this new world and learn how to protect ourselves just like we would if we went out on the street which in some places can be even more dangerous.
Comment by J5 — April 4, 2007 @ 3:53 am
Havoc’s blog doesn’t allow replies, so posting here.
Havoc is completely off the map with his comments, and I agree with Mathias Hasselmann.
You shouldn’t put your private stuff online.
Just because “everybody else is”, doesn’t mean you we should too, or that it’s the “right thing to do”.
Comment by anon — April 4, 2007 @ 3:57 am
Too bad his blog doesn’t accept comments…
One big problem with that approach is that it makes you depend completely on proprietary software vendors, even more so than installing proprietary software locally. That’s the exact opposite of what Free Software is supposed to be about. I don’t think encouraging users to sacrifice their freedoms just to go with the latest hype (which is obviously hyped by the very people out to make money out of it at the expense of the user!) is a bright idea at all, and a road for a Free Desktop to follow. Web services are the ultimate form of proprietary lock in, at any moment they can terminate your account and delete all your data, or ask any amount of money for continued access for it. They also generally centrally install software updates for all users, so you get forced updates which sometimes come with feature regressions (the most common one probably being compatibility regressions, where suddenly they require some proprietary browser or plugin you don’t have) or other annoyances (usability regressions, interface changes you just don’t like etc.). If GNOME regresses their UI, at least you can still run an old version (or even patch the new version to work the way you like, another option you don’t have with web services). If a web service regresses their UI, you’re screwed, you can’t use that web service the way you did before at all anymore.
Users should also be warned that the “free” (as in beer) web services are usually free only when introduced, to get users hooked. Then they either become loaded with so many ads they’re unusable (often charging you to get rid of them), start charging a fee (at least for “premium” features which were part of the killer “free” features used to lure new users in at the beginning) or both.
Comment by Kevin Kofler — April 4, 2007 @ 4:06 am
Oh, and for privacy (a good point I didn’t make at all), you don’t send your personal documents to a mailing list.
Or is there a secret fedora-shopping-list I don’t know about? 
Comment by Kevin Kofler — April 4, 2007 @ 4:10 am
Excellent points.
Comment by anon — April 4, 2007 @ 4:12 am
Kevin: Thank you alot for expressing what I just was able to think. You also helped me to understand the roots of my aggressive feelings against such “services”: In the end those services cut your freedom when you decide to use them. Realizing someone attemts to cut your freedom definitly should make you angry.
Havoc’s suggestion to throw away EDS and replace it with some Mugshot based stuff is such an attempt.
I fully believe those services could support your life, but for beeing acceptable at least two guaranties have to be made:
1) The use of those services must be fully optional.
2) You must be able to freely choose your service provider up to the point, that you could install a 100% compatible variant of the service on your own computers. The Web 1.0 is a good example for this – how many propritary online services failed before the Web became common. Another example is MS Passport vs. OpenID. Waiting for a truly open variant of Second Life…
Comment by Mathias Hasselmann — April 4, 2007 @ 9:22 am
Mugshot isn’t tied to proprietary service. You need to select a service you trust. Do you trust your bank with your money? Well that isn’t in your immediate control. What if you could tie your mugshot desktop to your own backup servers? The reason Facebook et al exists without FOSS equivalents is because no one is creating them but face it web software is the future. I keep saying, as a FOSS community we own a huge number of servers and clients yet we never connect them in interesting ways. Now you want to scuttle the effort because we have to connect to proprietary apps to make it interesting because no one in the FOSS community has jumped at the chance to make an open source google or flickr.
If RMS had said I am going to stop developing GNU because I have to use proprietary tools to do it we wouldn’t have the GNU toolchain. Instead he went about reimplementing each part piece by piece.
Comment by J5 — April 4, 2007 @ 10:06 am
@j5:
I don’t have a problem with the idea of a web enabled desktop, but playing on the FOSS community vs the closed source community is never going to be a defensible stance.
The problem with your RMS example is that all he had was closed source bits to work with. Whatever he replaced, it would be a net win because he was replacing closed source with open source. Our situation is a little different, we have closed source bits on the server and open source bits on the desktop.
I don’t see having a web-enabled desktop as being a rallying cry for development of FOSS webservices. The web distribution model just isn’t like that – you don’t get users by releasing your software to run on their machines. You have centralized servers. Sure, they can open source their stuff, but there’s not as compelling a reason for them to. Having a web enabled desktop IMO does nothing to make it more compelling. In fact, if you provide tie-ins with existing proprietary services it does exactly the opposite.
And given our current habit of chasing users, the only metric used to determine whether a service should be supported/blessed in this web enabled desktop is the size of the userbase, not the free/closed nature of the service.
But back to the rms analogy. It doesn’t seem quite logical to be replacing the open source bits to tie them to closed source services, instead of reimplementing the closed source bits, if the stated goal (and I haven’t seen this stated anywhere) is to push for making the entire stack open.
Comment by toshok — April 4, 2007 @ 1:19 pm
Another problem is that even if they open the source of their web services under a Free Software license (which definitely isn’t the case of most current web services), they can still lock you in if you don’t have local backups of all your data they host! There’s 2 points of control with web services: the software provider and the host. Usually it’s the same company, so you don’t notice, but there’s really both. Freeing the software would only free you from the “software provider” part. It would be better than the status quo, but you’d still not be safe from lock in if you rely exclusively on the service they host to take care of your data.
That said, I don’t believe any of the current web service providers even considers freeing their source, as it would only help “competition”, something we Free Software people see as an advantage, but the lock-in vendors sure don’t! So I think J5 is right that Free web services would have to come from Free Software people, not from web service companies.
Comment by Kevin Kofler — April 4, 2007 @ 1:38 pm
toshok,
You are completely right we don’t want to replace any desktop bits with proprietary ones. What is suggested is we expand the desktop onto the web. Mugshot itself is completely open and we have server code from apache and other sources for doing web enabled drives. Perhaps GNOME would like to do something similar to Apples iLife? What mugshot does right now is hook into compelling services a majority of which are proprietary (it also hooks into rss feeds, the web, rythmbox etc.) but also gives a common interface for all of those things and a way to replace them.
Also look for the Tubes and D-Tubes talk from the Telepathy guys at GUADEC. That could make making web services a bit easier in FOSS, even desktop based web services (where the desktop is the server).
We need to leapfrog the proprietary vendors. Push them to the edge of the network as useful tools but keep the interfaces and core.
Comment by J5 — April 4, 2007 @ 1:58 pm