

O'Reilly: "We're heading into a war for control of the web."  - lecha
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/the-war-for-the-web.html

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wingo
Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU
hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is,
and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be?

To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data
and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something
like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric
cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in
sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g.
facebook.com.

Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really
at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that
net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality
of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".

~~~
wmf
<http://autonomo.us/> has a lot of discussions of this topic.

~~~
wingo
Thanks for the link, looks like good ideas. I'll see what possible engagement
there is there.

The thing about the GNU project now -- speaking for myself, not for the
project -- is that we have a few hundred really good hackers, and we're done
making a Unix clone. We need something new. This kind of thing sounds like a
good direction.

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albertsun
Fits in well with this recent story
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943261> about it being time for personal
servers.

Just like I can run my own blog on my own server with Wordpress instead of
needing to have it hosted on Wordpress.com, I wish someone would release an
open source webmail client of equivalent quality to Gmail that could be
installed on personal servers, would also support XMPP, etc.

Same for other cloud software now. Why not offer it as an upfront purchase
price, plus a continuing support contract, with the software running on
hardware that the end user has ultimate control over.

~~~
jacquesm
I use horde for webmail, I don't use XMPP but I think it is supported.

~~~
xinsight
While Horde is an open-source email reader, it's not in the same league as
gmail. Not even close.

~~~
e1ven
I've had decent experiences with Roundcube, if you're looking for a more AJAX-
driven client; The versions I've tested were a bit buggy, but that was a few
years back, I'm sure it's improved by now. <http://roundcube.net/>

------
lecha
"we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform,
Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it
out until one is king of the hill. "

The argument makes a lot of sense, but why is Amazon in this list? It is true
that Amazon is in the war for control. But that war is for control of the data
center, not for control of the web.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_why is Amazon in this list?_

Kindle, I suspect.

Remember, this is being written by Tim O'Reilly, a person who has reason to
know and care about the Kindle's position in the digital-text marketplace and
the relative openness (or lack of openness) of the platform.

I agree that Amazon Web Services doesn't seem to belong on this list. AWS is a
powerful offering, but it's not as if Amazon has an exclusive lock on the
Linux virtual server business. I believe that even their provisioning API is
in the process of being cloned in open source.

~~~
lecha
Ah yes, thanks. Kindle slipped my mind. It makes sense now.

Kindle does have a potential to become a walled-garden ecosystem reminiscent
to Apple. There's nothing Kindle wants more than to become an iPod of books
and will very likely curb the Web experience on Kindle to suit its business
needs.

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raintrees
And meanwhile, the whole debate may get t-boned in the intersection by the
banning of net neutrality. Only those (large?) partners that make deals with
(large?) ISPs get their applications to work fast and smooth (if at all?).

It seems we have several fronts to watch/defend...

~~~
access_denied
There is not much industry organizations in IT. Small shops should found
stuff.

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protomyth
I am a little confused when we talk about "The Web" and include applications
for mobile devices. I am really more concerned with what HTML5 is capable of
and how widely it is implemented. The iPhone, in my mind, is more like the
XBox or PSP model of development.

~~~
olefoo
Given that many of these walled garden technologies use web-content within
applications (a lot of iphone apps are nothing more than site-specific
browsers with minimal custom UI chrome), and that most of them restrict access
to programmer and debugging tools (enforced by law on devices that promise DRM
to content-providers). An iPhone, an XBox, a PSP or any other device that can
serve as a general purpose computer but does not allow the end-user to do so
is taking away freedom 0.

You may be willing to make that choice in the short term, for this year's fad
gadget, but will you want to be locked into it?

------
TheEarlyShow
It's one of the better articles that Tim has put out as of late.

I still don't get the angst against Apple and their approach though. If you
don't care for it, don't use it - what's the big deal?

Apple has went out of its way to complete a infrastructure and effectively
trained it's customers to make purchases in small amounts. From music and etc
content, to anything in the App store. That's their ecosystem.

In what other market can you go inside and and just start putting products on
their shelf and that be ok? I mean, I'd _love_ to walk into Wal-Mart and put a
whole stock of pull-my-finger novelty gifts in aisle 9.

Sarcasm aside, I can't see how developers can bitch about an ecosystem that
they're wanting to exploit. Otherwise they'd be building little j2me
applications for the RAZR, or apart of the Blackberry ecosystem, or... .

But every other day there's someone new on a blog griping about something they
well and truly signed up for. Android is about to be out en mass with the
upcoming phones, Blackberry already has a mass of phones.

Teach those users to make purchases in an ecosystem that isn't going to be
easy to do so and then leverage it. But to soapbox against Apple just doesn't
make sense to me.

~~~
gaius
He makes a bad analogy because 1) you never needed Microsoft's permission to
develop a Windows app and 2) developers on Windows (very nearly) had the
"write once, run anywhere" promise that Java still hasn't lived up to taken
for granted. Plus there were very low barriers to entry for developers in the
Windows world; anyone could knock something up in VB or Access and nearly
anyone else could get it to work on their Windows PC with minimal effort. Try
doing that on the 50 (100?) Linux distros out there...

~~~
jacquesm
There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux
distros without too much trouble: static linking.

You'll still need to support 32 and 64 bits so it isn't completely painless
but it's a lot better than trying to cope with all the flavours.

~~~
antonovka
_There is a very simple solution to getting your stuff to run on many linux
distros without too much trouble: static linking._

That's not simple at all. If I want to integrate properly with your desktop,
do I write my code against gnome or KDE?

If I statically link against an older (or newer) version of gnome or KDE, will
it even interoperate correctly with whatever the user has running on their
desktop?

If there's a security vulnerability in what should be a base system library,
does every single vendor have to track those issues and release updates to
their applications?

No. The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible,
stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and
updates.

~~~
jacquesm
> The right way to support binary compatibility is to define a compatible,
> stable API and ABI and then support that ABI/API across OS releases and
> updates.

With that I fully agree. But I think if the last decade is any indication that
in the linux world we are still at least a decade away from achieving that,
even though there are plenty of efforts in that direction.

All this freedom is a mixed blessing.

------
chris100
It's a thought-provoking article.

But I don't embrace the culture of free as much as Tim. If he gets his way, no
company would be allowed to profit, everything would be open. Somehow, Google
would be the only one to survive in the environment.

Tim is not shocked that Google is giving away for free the GPS software and
therefore killing the GPS device makers. It would be anti-dumping if software
had a fixed cost, but it doesn't...

Where is the fine-line between playing dirty and being a great contributor to
free technologies? Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10
years ago, they would have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic
position.

The thought-provoking part of the article is what Tim leaves out. What does an
open world look like? Can the world be 100% open, or will there always be
large companies fighting to control it? To me, it sounds a little bit utopian
to hope or assume that 100% open is possible.

~~~
gloob
_Think of it this way: if Microsoft had done the same 10 years ago, they would
have immediately been sued for abuse of monopolistic position._

And that's the difference: Microsoft had a monopolistic position. Open-source
doesn't, so much. What's more, open-source isn't even an organization, so it
doesn't even make semantic sense to say that it could have a monopolistic
position.

Google (specifically) is a different matter. If they become a monopoly, smack
them down. It makes little difference to free/open-source software at large,
though.

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neovive
Very interesting article. It's clear that large (non-interoperable) silos are
forming across the various aspects of the web -- content, data and
infrastructure. Developers should be concerned as this will bring us back to a
time where we need to build 3-4 versions of everything. However, the industry
changes fast and this competition may open up opportunities for smaller
players to fulfill various needs.

------
leej
Points Tim has got wrong: \- Google and Amazon does not have the platform
value as Apple or Facebook has! \- This era is not different from PC era at
all. He just does not want or have courage to say it: Google is the new
Microsoft. It's doing the exact opposite (of MS) and still locks customers in.
If you want free GPS then you MUST buy Android phone from THE carrier(s).
Amazon is not on the Google level but if you want to buy (e-)book who would be
your choice? Amazon, of course. Does this count as lock-in? Yes it does. \-
Microsoft and champion of open web? How will that be so?

~~~
loup-vaillant
It may be so if they realize that the locking, this time, is not in their
favour. Then, the only way to avoid death may be advocating an open internet,
where lock-in is less likely.

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grandalf
When I read the quote I wasn't sure which O'Reilly it was referring to.

