Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Free as in Freedom Hosting/Cloud_Services

[Ted Smith]

On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 13:10 -0500, libreplanet@lewman.us wrote:
> If there is free software available on which I can run on my own free
> hardware, then the cloud provider is not free. If the cloud provider
> allows you to join their cloud using the exact same free software as
> they do, then perhaps they are free. Perhaps a debate for another
> topic
> and time.
> 
I think this is an overly restrictive view of freedom.

Since network services aren't free or non-free, I don't think there's
much of a difference between blogspot, wordpress, and noblogs.

There's a difference between "something that you can use with only free
software" and "something the FSF can recommend other people use." 

Personally, I run my own Wordpress blog, and interact with it mostly
from Emacs, but I could do the same with a blogspot or wordpress.com
blog, and I don't think it would be terribly different.

We're getting into territory that reminds me of early autonomo.us
discussions and the Franklin Street Statement:
<http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/>

Specifically:


> Service providers are encouraged to:
>       * ...
>       * Make data and works of authorship available to their service’s
>         users under legal terms and in formats that enable the users
>         to move and use their data outside of the service. This
>         means: 
>               * Users should control their private data.
>               * Data available to all users of the service should be
>                 available under terms approved for Free Cultural Works
>                 or Open Knowledge.


Defining network service freedom as a sort of "I can leave at any time"
property (the software is free, the data is portable, I can move from
wp.com to my own self-hosted instance whenever) is nice, but it fails in
some cases. For example, is a BitTorrent tracker a free network service?
The software might be free, but the value in a tracker comes from the
people connecting to it, and that isn't something you can install
locally.


> Evil or good are morality
> judgments and irrelevant to the free vs non-free discussion.
> 
Is "Things can be evil while being free, and free without being good, so
we need to decide if something is free or non-free independently first
and avoid propagating good/evil judgments to free/non-free evaluations"
a fair rephrasing of this?

I (somewhat) agree, but most people on this list take free software to
be a political/moral issue, and so I think this point was slightly
miscommunicated here.

-- 
Sent from Ubuntu