[Freedombox-discuss] I Have Seen the Future and I Am Opposed

[Tom Marble]

All:

The provocative subject isn't mine, but rather the title
of a very apropos essay [0] by Don Norman [1].

Norman's writings have inspired my own work on software
design. Here he speaks to a very important point:
we are headed for a world of walled gardens.
It is important to note he left the now current leader
of walled garden commercialization long ago.

My thinking has about FB changed since I first learned
about it at Debconf. I have thought - but not yet verbalized -
that Diaspora isn't really the goal. Well, to be fair,
it's not my goal.  And that challenge of goal
diversity was evident immediately.

Sure it would be fun to support OpenBTS, FreeSWITCH,
some Free alternative to Dropbox (Sparkleshare?),
basic Mail and Web services and Diaspora/Tonido
services, etc.  Hey, what about a Free URL shortener?

But what really captured my thinking was a combination
of Eben's point about the 'value in the server log files',
the very cool work leveraging the Web-of-Trust (e.g.
Monkeysphere [2]) and the possibilities with mesh networking.

The recent events in Egypt have reinforced the thought
that FB can be a software foundation (on top of Debian)
on which to provide very fundamental (low level) services.
Important parts of this are machine facilitation for
getting more people involved in the Web-of-Trust,
multi-path, reliable networking based on IPv6,
reslient (and quorum/historically influenced) DNS,
as well as Tor and friends.

So I think I see FB as taking the early Internet collaboration
in a direction it was headed with Usenet, based on open protocols
and open implementations.  We ended up with one *de facto*
client/server paradigm for Internet computing.  FB is going
back to the future of 1993 and thinking of "another way".

I Have Seen the Future and I Know We Can Debug It.

--Tom

[0] http://m.core77.com/blog/columns/i_have_seen_the_future_and_i_am_opposed_18532.asp
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Don_Norman
[2] http://web.monkeysphere.info/