Ask HN: Do we need a Mozilla for web apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do we need a Mozilla for web apps?

5 pointsInc824 comments

Access to the internet in my opinion is a basic right that should be free and unencumbered. I love Mozilla's mission: "At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible". While free, open, and secure browsers and mobile OS's certainly are important, you could argue that there are certain types of apps that should also be included in our 'basic rights'. I'm thinking of personal cloud storage (dropbox, drive) and social networking (Facebook, Twitter) among others. Do we need a foundation backed, open source, non-profit that isn't concerned with immediate results and has the long term vision of providing services like Mozilla does except in the vain of web apps?

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The things you describe, unlike Firefox and the web frameworks Mozilla develops, require servers. Servers are expensive, even with the current low cost-end users ratio of cloud servers.

I think few people will agree that it is within your "basic rights" to demand someone else store, munge, and beautifully surface your data at their expense.

What is your issue with Dropbox, Facebook, etc? If it's privacy, roll your own server. There are plenty of projects to provide Google Docs/Drive functionality on your own server. Normal office suites also work just fine. Dropbox is basically glorified rsync. Ello, App.net, etc cater to the privacy conscious social networker.

We do definitely 'need' it. I think the bottleneck at the moment is technological, and slightly cultural. Basically we don't have an efficient way to run free open-source web services that could out-compete their commercial alternatives. Only in the last few years is open-source software really starting to take-off and it's mostly due to better infrastructure (technological and cultural) around open-source development rather than the actual projects themselves. My best bet is that IaaS has to become virtually free and the tools around software defined infrastructures have to get better. It's just too hard to open-source infrastructure. My second guess is huge progress in distributed de-centralized software with a 'centralized-like' functionality, but it seems at least 10 years away, the former is more likely.

Mozilla is the Mozilla of web apps. Without them we would have brain dead IE and Safari API´s. Stuff like VML and -webkit-match-nearest-mail-blockquote-color. Standards are what makes web apps possible. Who pays for running servers is another issue.

I'd like to see NASA focus on low-orbit wifi and P2P meshnets. The new 4G LTE chips are pretty remarkable. I think meshnets will eventually bring decent internet to every last person.

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