User Freedom and Web Services

The current rush by proprietary software vendors to a web services model, whereby users use less and less software on their own hardware and more and more software locked away on provider's equipment has some unsettling implications for user freedom. Here, we describe the problem in some detail, and offer some potential solutions for consideration and implementation.

DRAFT - WORK IN PROGRESS

Permalink | Comments — Nato Welch 2006/10/31 22:10

The Free Software movement has a long history of advocating freedom for users of software. Long before the Internet was popularized, The Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and other participants held that software that a user runs on hardware they own should not be licensed in such a way as to restrict their ability to use, modify, redistribute, and redistribute modifications to, that software. The GNU General Public License was created to help preserve these freedoms.

In time, the software industry began to take notice of significant Free Software, and a number of Free Software developers began to comprehend and explain the dynamics of it in the proprietary software marketplace. As the movement grew, a number of different perspectives on Free Software emerged from interaction with industry, wherein the emphasis was placed on the quality and competitiveness of "Open Source" software and the development processes that grew out of the licensing conventions, rather than the more ideological foundations of user freedom. This perspective is known as the Open Source software movement. When considered together, these perspectives are known as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

FOSS lowers the barriers to entry in the software marketplace. Although FOSS development does not necessarily always participate in it, the effect of having no-cost alternatives to proprietary applications increases the competitiveness of proprietary software vendors (PSV's), forcing them to be more accountable and responsive to their customers, lest they change to the FOSS application. The same accountability accrues to software developers who maintain FOSS applications, as well. Any person or organization who controls the patching and distributions of a given software package is, of course, free not to commit features or fix bugs, even if other participants submit changes. But if they don't, and the fixes are popular enough among the userbase, the users are within their rights to "fork" the codebase, electing new maintainers, and getting their way in that fashion.

It is this accountability mechanism, this check-and-balance system, that not only insures the ideological freedoms of software users and developers, but also enforces quality standards and competitiveness upon proprietary software vendors who don't even participate in FOSS development. Without FOSS, PSV's would quickly dominate and monopolize most niches in the software market, resulting in skimpy choices, little freedom, and application lock-in as the rule, rather than the exception it is today. When considering web services, our task is to discover and implement ways in which these benefits of FOSS to users can also be impressed upon web service providers.

Web services are application service providers, who run software on their own systems that users can use remotely. Most often, these providers host content contributed by the user, and provide services for hosting, sharing, integrating and aggregating contributed content. Often, these service are provided without charge to users; advertising presented in the software interface funds the provider's operations.

Providers own and operate the servers, develop, support, and maintain the software, whether server or client. Advertisers serve as the Providers' customers. Users serve as the Providers' service, in a commercial sense.

Note that by "web services", it is not meant to imply that everything operate over HTTP. Any application that can operate over Internet Protocol is included.

1. Providers vs pirates. A web service provider also has another advantage over a traditional proprietary software vendor: because users do not run a copy software on their own machines, there is no threat of copyright infringers producing unauthorized copies for other users. In light of this advantage, almost every major proprietary software vendor is in the process of moving to a web service provider business model (Microsoft, other examples).
2. Security. fewer users, not dependent on often flaky users to update (for better or worse). this is also a downside, privacy wise. A single breach can expose many users - although a vulnerability in the software can also expose many users when repeated against each of them. version diversity may mitigate this.
3. Quality. see security, but applied to feature updates, bugfixes, performance, etc.
4. use any software. unlike traditional psv's, web service providers can make use of the extensive library of existing Free Software, including applications licensed under the GNU GPL. PSV's are limited by their model only to some, unless they are not concerned by the possibility that their customers could provide unlimited copies of the software to anyone else.

As this trend continues, users are seeing more and more of the software they use being run on hardware they do not have control over.

The GNU GPLv2 requires that if a user redistributed modifications to any application he licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, those modifications would have to be sublicensed under the same terms, thus preserving and perpetuating the freedoms provided in the rest of the license.

One peculiarity of the terms of the GNU GPL is that ther relicensing term was not triggered unless a licensee actually distributed GPL-licensed software containing modifications; if the modified software is never distributed, no obligation to license it is incurred.

While a traditional proprietary software vendor would incur the relicensing term by selling copies of software to customers to run on their own hardware, a service provider escapes this obligation by instead running modified software on their own hardware instead. Because a user interacts with the software running on the provider's hardware over the network, no distribution occurs, and the GPL's relicensing requirements do not apply.

The fact that the web service model allows providers to use Free Software as well as just OSS has advantages, as it tends to bring support for Free Software that otherwise did not exist. As WSP's provide more of the software people commonly use, the likelihood that more and larger users will contribute to existing FOSS projects increases, whereas they would only contribute only to OSS previously. This reduces the proliferation of licenses and application forks over licensing differences.

In the traditional software use model, in which the Free Software movement was born, the users of sofware ran that software on their own hardware. The user of software and the owner of hardware were one and the same. The philosophy that inhered in the movement drew strength from the acceptance of strong physical property rights: no one but the owner should be able to dictate how one disposes of one's own property.

The Web services model introduces a complication into this idea. Since the provider is clearly the owner of the hardware, a strong property rights bias dictates that the users of the software have no claims to the freedoms advocated by the Free Software movement as they pertain to the provider's services. Property proponents are often satisfied with this, as one can expect little more than allow providers the same rights enjoyed by everyone. The Free Software Foundation, is not, as evidenced by their continuous advocacy for freedoms for the users of software - not just the owners of hardware. This has been the case since the FSF was founded, and continues to be the primary focus of the Free Software movement despite what may be lost in terms of support from property rights advocates in the age of web services.

So how do we, then, go about promoting user freedoms in this era of hardware and software rental, rather than sale?

1. flickr api to/from (other provider)
2. users providing eyeball services for vendors not enough; users don't have neough foresight to exert pressure.
3. pressure exerted by ad watchers is even less than paying customers, which is still not enough.
4. second life feature wishlist/voting system is not democracy or control.
5. this is the current state. not satisfactory.

1. decentralizaiton is complex, young, difficult. trust/reputation systems are needed.
2. often value is in aggregating and integrating data, or in the data itself. forking codebases is one thing, forking a DATA base or even a userbase is another.

(Yougle?)

1. using a site incurs real power. It may also incur real profits! or losses, for that matter.
2. how to keep out fake accounts?
3. permits centralized structure; easier to design and manage.

forking web services?

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-July/000818.html http://movemydata.org/ http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1537213

Permalink | Comments — Nato Welch 2006/10/31 22:10