

Ask HN: Do we need a Mozilla for web apps? - Inc82

Access to the internet in my opinion is a basic right that should be free and unencumbered.  I love Mozilla&#x27;s mission: &quot;At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible&quot;.  While free, open, and secure browsers and mobile OS&#x27;s certainly are important, you could argue that there are certain types of apps that should also be included in our &#x27;basic rights&#x27;.  I&#x27;m thinking of personal cloud storage (dropbox, drive) and social networking (Facebook, Twitter) among others.  Do we need a foundation backed, open source, non-profit that isn&#x27;t concerned with immediate results and has the long term vision of providing services like Mozilla does except in the vain of web apps?
======
yzzxy
The things you describe, unlike Firefox and the web frameworks Mozilla
develops, require servers. Servers are expensive, even with the current low
cost-end users ratio of cloud servers.

I think few people will agree that it is within your "basic rights" to demand
someone else store, munge, and beautifully surface your data at their expense.

What is your issue with Dropbox, Facebook, etc? If it's privacy, roll your own
server. There are plenty of projects to provide Google Docs/Drive
functionality on your own server. Normal office suites also work just fine.
Dropbox is basically glorified rsync. Ello, App.net, etc cater to the privacy
conscious social networker.

------
auganov
We do definitely 'need' it. I think the bottleneck at the moment is
technological, and slightly cultural. Basically we don't have an efficient way
to run free open-source web services that could out-compete their commercial
alternatives. Only in the last few years is open-source software really
starting to take-off and it's mostly due to better infrastructure
(technological and cultural) around open-source development rather than the
actual projects themselves. My best bet is that IaaS has to become virtually
free and the tools around software defined infrastructures have to get better.
It's just too hard to open-source infrastructure. My second guess is huge
progress in distributed de-centralized software with a 'centralized-like'
functionality, but it seems at least 10 years away, the former is more likely.

------
jp
Mozilla is the Mozilla of web apps. Without them we would have brain dead IE
and Safari API´s. Stuff like VML and -webkit-match-nearest-mail-blockquote-
color. Standards are what makes web apps possible. Who pays for running
servers is another issue.

------
logn
I'd like to see NASA focus on low-orbit wifi and P2P meshnets. The new 4G LTE
chips are pretty remarkable. I think meshnets will eventually bring decent
internet to every last person.

