[Freedombox-discuss] Finding a good place to start

[Christian Brædstrup]

Hi all,

Like all of you I also got all riled up by Eben Moglen and his views on
freedom. Unfortunately being a student I don't really have to cash or time
to have seen him in person but he is quite good on video too :)

Before hearing his speech I bought a Aleutia T1 to run OpenMediaVault on but
after hearing his views on Freedom in the cloud I decided I wanted to host
not only my personal data (The documents I want to have available
everywhere) but also my public data (Social network, Mail and the like). So
I trashed OpenMediaVault because it will not do what I want and browsed to
Google. I looked around for a project that I could join/start but found only
the SuperB Mini Server project. I like the philosophy of Slackware but don't
like working in it (Sorry Slackware) so I decided to trash the community
approach and just hack something for my self out of stock Debian. Having
played with Linux since primary school I don't mind config files and quite
like working late into the night because I just broke my graphics driver
(that happened a lot on Red Hat 6.0). I decided to share my discoveries once
I got a system up and running but the I found you guys.

I have been spot reading on the mailing list and as far as I can see the
main question now is the same that Erich asked in his mail: Where do we
start?

The discussion about how to setup the config files and how to maintain the
packages was quite interesting. I found my self agreeing with both sides and
I see up- and downsides with both solutions. That being said I personally
agree most with Jonas. Debian is a insanely large community and I think the
benefits of working within that community are too great to ignore. There are
a lot of projects out there that have customized them self so much that the
freedom to use the code can't compare with the time needed to implement it
into your own project. I would rather see that the developments in FB where
merged into the packages in Debian and helped the entire community then just
the FB users. I of course see the problems with slow movement on the Debian
side of things but I think that once the project gets up and running the
package maintainers will push updates faster because they will begin to use
the project themself. I think every "real" open source/freedom geek wants to
secure there privacy but don't have the time to set it up.

As I see it FB is a platform. Not in the Eben Moglen sense where it
restricts the users but where the system gives the users that basic tools of
freedom to work from. The French engineer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
once said"Perfection
is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is
nothing left to take away." and I think that is what FB should be all about.
Almost all GNU/Linux systems gives that freedom now but at a high setup
cost. Ex. I want my system to handle my mails, run a Diaspora server, share
my home files through a SSH connection, share my media with my PS3 on a UPnP
connection and nothing more. I don't need a webserver visible to the outside
world because I don't blog or host my own site. I don't want a SquirrelMail
web interface to my home mail server because I just push the mails to a MUA.
Having a server running a webmail interface would just be a drain on my
processor and a security risk. Also if FB has to run on a embedded device
with limited resources it needs to be small and the most user-freedom is
archived when he/she only install what is needed instead of getting a
prebuild ISO. Therefore I think that providing a basic Debian distro with
the bare essentials and building custom one-click-install config files for
stock apt packages is the way to go. That way we don't need to host the
packages or think about maintaining a semi-separate Debian branch but just
host the config files and setup the server to combine the two on install.
This will give the most freedom to the users because they don't need to get
and understand our hacked versions if they want to change something. They
can just get the stock package change it and send a patch to the maintainer.

My sugestion is to make a list on the wiki of what a base system with a web
GUI needs and a discussion about how best to build a solid base for the
system. All the programs we need to make this project work have already been
made FB needs to be that glue that binds them into one platform.
But that is of course just my views and I would like to hear if they are way
out there compared to what you guys think? I wasn't at the DebConf meeting
and the limited info on the wiki doesn't tell much about the broader
discussion that properly went on so I am sorry if my points have all ready
been discussed but as I could see on the wiki and mailing list it hasn't.

Cheers,
Christian
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