[Freedombox-discuss] What dreams are made of...

stillyet at googlemail.com stillyet at googlemail.com
Sat Feb 19 20:41:04 UTC 2011


On 19/02/2011, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
> Hi fellow Freedom fighters,
>
> No, I don't think that FreedomBox is simply "Debian in a box".

Indeed, FreedomBox must not be simply 'Debian in a box', or it cannot
be FreedomBox at all. Monocultures are extremely vulnerable to
pathogens. FreedomBox, if it is to do what we dream of FreedomBox
doing, it is undoubtedly going to be attacked by agencies with very
much larger budgets than any free software project can find.

Debian FreedomBox may be a reference implementation, and I agree that
that reference implementation should comprise stable packages. But the
definition of FreedomBox needs to be a set of services exposed to the
network, and a Debian FreedomBox should neither know nor care whether
other FreedomBoxes with which it interacts are also Debian
FreedomBoxes provided they respond in the right ways to the right
stimuli.

We're much better off if there are a heterogeneous population of
FreedomBoxes, heterogenous in both hardware and software. It isn't
good enough if every FreedomBox uses package foo to handle protocol
bar. The great Sendmail worm spread so destructively precisely because
Sendmail ran on virtually every processor architecture under several
dozen significantly different operating systems. If every FreedomBox
uses daemon foo to handle protocol bar, and if agency TLA can find a
flaw in foo, then agency TLA can bring down the whole FreedomBox
population.

In ecosystems, heterogeneity is strength.

For the rest, I agree with the comment that FreedomBox should run well
on low specced hardware, since in some of the places it may be
required to run, it may require to run on inconspicuous hardware or
where access to mains electricity is unreliable or unavailable, So if
we take (for example) the SheevaPlug as a delivery platform on which
FreedomBox must run, we're guaranteeing that it will be lightweight
enough to run on whatever usable platform the user happens to have to
hand (getting it to work on various common mobile phone handsets would
also be a worthwhile project).

Related to this we need to think about the situation of nodes which do
not have a reliable connection to the public Internet. However, that's
another problem which deserves a separate thread.

-- 
Simon Brooke :: http://www.journeyman.cc/~simon/

		;; Semper in faecibus sumus, sole profundum variat.



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