

Towards a GNU autonomous cloud - dharmatech
http://wingolog.org/archives/2010/04/10/towards-a-gnu-autonomous-cloud

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forkandwait
I can't believe I haven't put the words "Gnu" and "Facebook" together in my
mind before....

Of course, something like this should be done. There are important questions
about the technical architecture (I only ask one thing -- DONT USE XML...),
especially because of privacy, but there are also opportunities to explicitly
and collectively decide processes (Yay democracy!) -- if the users of FB could
vote on issues of data sharing, things there might be really, really
different.

~~~
forkandwait
And furthermore (too late to edit) -- perhaps we could see apps regarding
instant run-off voting instead of that stupid farm game...

(Also, I blithely ignored the Git / VC angle that might have been the original
post -- my apologies...)

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zacharypinter
I've had similar thoughts in the past and brought them up on HN here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917>

~~~
forkandwait
The above post links out to <http://autonomo.us/>, where Stallman talks about
Software as a Service and its anti freedom implications. It is interesting
reading, but I think collective projects can be Free (as in freedom) when they
are collectively controlled and open; this is the important difference between
Wikipedia (Free) and Google Docs (not Free). I don't think the important
difference is technical, as RMS seems to (whether or not an application
"belongs" local or remote).

"Collectively controlled" is the hard problem. It is probably impossible to
solve cleanly without hard tradeoffs, whether in a society (do we let people
shout fire? consensus versus majority vote? one vote per share or one vote per
person?) or in a computer project (do we sanction bad editors? Are certain
topics off limits? etc).

So... I think a Gnu FB is actually an awesome challenge, both technically and
socially.

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mark_l_watson
I like the link posted in the first article comment:
<http://onesocialweb.org/> (except their code base is not up on github yet -
hopefully soon) Written in Java, uses XMPP, and comes with an Android client -
at least it sounds good.

The article has some interesting points but ideas without code for a prototype
implementation to back them up is not very useful.

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blasdel
While impractical and reminiscent of 90s crypto-wankery ( _oh no clipper chip_
, et al), it's still far more worthwhile than what Stallman's been pushing
lately about cloud services.

Stallman seems to think that users give a shit about software, as if everyone
using the AGPL would somehow fix everything — except that thet's total
bullshit — people only care about access to their _data_ , the code serving it
up is completely irrelevant. You wouldn't be able to run your own instance of
Facebook on localhost anyway, even if that was somehow useful.

Stallman's refusal to use any cloud services leaves him woefully out of touch
with the reality of their implications.

~~~
wingo
Stallman has done lots of lovely work. Now he does some OK thinking. Just let
him be :)

In my case, one must recognize that the GNU manifesto was also impractical.
This totally might not work, but I think the concerns are valid, and the
implementation at least sounds fun to hack on.

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skybrian
As stated this is far too ambitious a goal. But let's say we don't worry about
traffic analysis and just protect the content. What would a minimal "git with
privacy" look like?

~~~
wingo
Git with privacy is a bit hard. Imagine that you determine that 123456abcde is
a the SHA-1 for a bomb-making cookbook. Well then you just monitor the net for
requests for that hash, and you see who's making bombs.

Tor-type privacy is also possible; but in this case I figure just delegate to
people who seem competent and also aware of the problems.

Btw it's all totally way too ambitious. Who knows what will happen, though?

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naner
This is absurd and will probably be about as successful as GNU Hurd.

~~~
wazoox
Absolutely not, this is absolutely right to the point. I'm saddened to see
people unable to understand anything.

~~~
forkandwait
The OP's post was sort of dumb, but he has a more general point: there is a
danger that the people who get involved will see it as a purely technical
exercise, ignore the user component, and quite possibly magnify complexity
when they should be choking complexity down as far as possible. We don't need
a concept car (Gnu Hurd), we need a Datsun B210 (Linux).

~~~
tree_of_item
Neither GNU Hurd nor Linux have focused on the user component very much.

~~~
blasdel
user ≠ grandma

Linux was written by someone who wanted to use a kernel that took advantage of
the MMU in his new 386. One did not exist, and he couldn't practically fork
Minix because of draconian licensing issues, so he wrote his own for himself
to use. Linux was written by and for a user.

Hurd, on the other hand, was designed for several orthogonal ideological
reasons, and never really written. There was never a user within sight of it,
including its creators.

