[Freedombox-discuss] Introductions

[Dafydd Harries]

Ar 23/08/2010 am 14:32, ysgrifennodd Lars Wirzenius:
> On su, 2010-08-22 at 21:16 -0400, Matt Lee wrote:
> > Hey, I'm Matt Lee, campaigns manager at the Free Software Foundation and
> > founder of GNU social and GNU FM. We're really happy to be included in
> > the list of the projects for the Freedom Box, and myself and Rob Myers
> > (the other principal at our small startup, FooCorp) have been looking at
> > this area for a little while now.
> 
> I'm Lars Wirzenius, long-time Linux and Debian developer, and free
> software hacker in general. I'm currently happily unemployed, but
> starting to look for work.

I'm Dafydd Harries, also a Debian developer and free software hacker.

> Here's how I think things might be easiest to develop:
> 
> * Alpha 0: a virtual machine that can do some basic server-at-home
> service reasonably well, with minimal setup, and no sysadmin required;
> server need not be accessible from outside the home network; make it
> easy to rebuild the image using debian-installer to set up a base
> system, and adding a meta-package
> 
> * Alpha 1: make Alpha 0 run on a plug computer, and add some
> configuration interface over a web browser
> 
> * Alpha 2: solve the addressabilty problem, so that the server can be
> accessed from outside the home network, regardless of NAT or ISP
> firewalls; add some sensible ways to authenticate users to the Freedom
> Box
> 
> * Alpha 3: add some more services; solve the works-without-configuration
> problem for all services generally; add automatic testing to the
> development process to make sure a fresh Freedom Box works, and upgrades
> never break anything
> 
> * Alpha 4: solve the backup problem for Freedom Box in some suitable way

This seems like a good plan to me.

The addressability problem is one that lots of other problems depend on. I
have a little experience in this area: I've worked on voice/video over IP for
Jabber — the Jingle protocol — which negotiates peer-to-peer connections so
that audio/video traffic doesn't go through the Jabber server. In that case,
though, you're bootstrapping using the fact that you have a service with a
well-known name and that can accept incoming connections — the Jabber server.
Should we expect to be able to use something similar for the freedom box?

Daf