The Franklin Street Statement on Free Network Services, four years after

Free software is no longer enough in the age of socal media and proprietary platforms, so in 2008 a group of FLOSS activists gathered to formulate a statement to create a dynamic for free network services as well.

At that time, Benjamin Mako Hill explained:

“On March 16, 2008, a workgroup convened at the Free Software Foundation, to discuss issues of freedom for users given the rise of network services. We considered a number of issues, among them what impacts these services have on user freedom, and how implementers of network services can help or harm users. We believe this will be an ongoing conversation, potentially spanning many years. Our hope is that free software and open source communities will embrace and adopt these values when thinking about user freedom and network services. We hope to work with organizations including the FSF to provide moral and technical leadership on this issue.”

But how much has really happened in these four years? Below, an optimistic and a more pessimistic statement about the (lack of) progress on this issue.

In an email to the still ongoing Autonomous mailing list, Hubert Figuière writes:

“Good things have happened, with various degrees of success:

MediaGoblin, Status.net, Diaspora, openphoto, BrowseID trying to fullfill the statements or mission of the FSS.

Non-withstanding things like OpenStack, Freebom box, that are here to help fullfill the infrastructure needs.”

Sepp Hasslberger responds:

“Not much seems to have happened since the Free Software Foundation, made their statement made 4 years ago. They are quite clear about user independence, and lay down what is preferable in the case of cloud software. Free software, free sharing, etc.

The services that Hubert lists:

– MediaGoblin – Yes, it’s a media sharing software, but from what I can see it doesn’t seem to be very popular. Reading their site, I am completely missing a clear, concise statement about what it’s good for, what one can use MediaGoblin for, and who’s using it. Perhaps the geeks believe everyone else is a geek as well, and if they aren’t … that’s just too bad.

– Status.net – according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StatusNet) is a free software microblogging service that gives a service similar to Twitter. On their page, they seem to market themselves majorly to businesses, and also here there is a missing statement, something that tells a complete non-tech person what it’s good for, in simple words.

– openphoto – the openphoto.net site is a free photo sharing service which is nice as it’s not commercial in any way, and each photo is shared with CC license. I like that service.

Looking at some of the photos on the site, I came across one in the “public domain”. I followed the CC link and got a page that says CC has eliminated the pubilc domain denomination and no longer supports that type of license. I am baffled why there seems to be no proper designation of content that the author declares to be in the public domain. Neither the Free Software Foundation nor the CC folks seem to be interested in that designation. Does it smack too much of anarchy to have absolutely no rights connected to some content? At times I would like to use a “public domain” designation on my work, but I can’t find any link to refer people to, that explains what it means that something is in the public domain. This is definitely a hole in the license types (a non-license?) that are available for use.

– BrowseID – doesn’t even seem to exist on the net. There is no site for it. browseid.com has a placeholder saying they’ll be having a site soon. I wonder what is being referred to here. Perhaps it is BrowserID, the Mozilla identity initiative that’s being now called ‘Persona’ in its public-facing version.

In any case, it seems that compared with the growth of cloud-based computing and (commercial) software as a service, little has been done so far to achieve what was laid out in the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. The statement is still valid as ever and is perhaps even more important today than when it was issued.

In my mind, the instances of microblogging, media sharing, and photo sharing (and the “under development” ID service of Mozilla) are nowhere near what the FSF envisions in their statement. “

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.