Are free software licences obsolete in an age of open networked applications?
This is certainly not a new issue for the free software community, but for our general readers, I recommend the following blog article. It starts by noting that as most of applications are now on the web, rather than running on our own computers, the free software protection of public code becomes less useful.
Rather we need open applications and ethical software guidelines that protect the users (and producers) of the data, vis a vis the platform provider.
We monitor such issues in our Standards pages, maintained by Michael Pick.
It’s a long entry, worth reading in full, here are just the key citations:
“Many popular web applications now open their web APIs, which allow other applications to access their data. These APIs allow users to build complex tools that collect data from multiple sources, similar to the way UNIX allows you to stack smaller applications and connect them together. Even if the back-end source code of these web applications was released, the application is often so heavily dependent on the information that it stores that it won’t necessarily be useful. That is not an argument for or against releasing back-end code, but is just to say that we’ve reached a point in software that accessing the data is more important than the process of how it is generated.
So as data becomes cheaper to process, the value appears to be in its analysis; making creative connections and correlations between dispersed data and unrelated pieces of information. ”’The dominant paradigm is shifting from the individual’s ability to process data towards the individual’s ability to access the preprocessed value created by large networks”’.”
What does all this mean for free and open source licenses? Well, as the boundary between local and remote applications gets blurred, it’s becoming clear that the licenses devised for local software are not well suited to the latest wave of web-based applications.
A new standard must be defined for these applications, one that considers the vast amounts of user data they are processing, storing and transmitting. A new standard has to strike a balance between the rights of the individual user and the right of the service provider to control and leverage the user’s data as an integral part of their networked application.
The next wave of ethical software must address the following issues:
* Individual ownership of data - Who owns personal information?
* Individual’s privacy - How is information shared? How anonymous is broad analysis?
* Redistribution of reprocessed data - Can I reuse the data in a new application?
* Cross compatibility between related networks - How easily can I move between competing services?
* Data Removal - How much information is retained after unsubscribing from the service?
* End of Service - What is the strategy for the stored data if the service fails?