Towards a GNU autonomous cloud
wingolog.org
wingolog.org
Of course, something like this should be done. There are important questions about the technical architecture (I only ask one thing -- DONT USE XML...), especially because of privacy, but there are also opportunities to explicitly and collectively decide processes (Yay democracy!) -- if the users of FB could vote on issues of data sharing, things there might be really, really different.
(Also, I blithely ignored the Git / VC angle that might have been the original post -- my apologies...)
"Collectively controlled" is the hard problem. It is probably impossible to solve cleanly without hard tradeoffs, whether in a society (do we let people shout fire? consensus versus majority vote? one vote per share or one vote per person?) or in a computer project (do we sanction bad editors? Are certain topics off limits? etc).
So... I think a Gnu FB is actually an awesome challenge, both technically and socially.
The article has some interesting points but ideas without code for a prototype implementation to back them up is not very useful.
Stallman seems to think that users give a shit about software, as if everyone using the AGPL would somehow fix everything — except that thet's total bullshit — people only care about access to their data, the code serving it up is completely irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to run your own instance of Facebook on localhost anyway, even if that was somehow useful.
Stallman's refusal to use any cloud services leaves him woefully out of touch with the reality of their implications.
In my case, one must recognize that the GNU manifesto was also impractical. This totally might not work, but I think the concerns are valid, and the implementation at least sounds fun to hack on.
Tor-type privacy is also possible; but in this case I figure just delegate to people who seem competent and also aware of the problems.
Btw it's all totally way too ambitious. Who knows what will happen, though?
Linux was written by someone who wanted to use a kernel that took advantage of the MMU in his new 386. One did not exist, and he couldn't practically fork Minix because of draconian licensing issues, so he wrote his own for himself to use. Linux was written by and for a user.
Hurd, on the other hand, was designed for several orthogonal ideological reasons, and never really written. There was never a user within sight of it, including its creators.