The LogiLogi Foundation

And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street-music, a fast and cheap metro sytem, good food & bars, and did I mention the weather ? Hmoah! :)

Anyway, enough about urban paradise: the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference was organized by the Free Knowledge Institute: the creators of the SELF-platform: a site for collaboratively creating teaching-materials. And this platform was a topic many interesting presentations were on: especially their approach to diffs, and the Gnowledge-system that runs their concept-map are worth a look (had good conversations with both their creators).

Besides our own, which went well again :) (slides are here, sources in svn), another interesting presentation was by the Vibal Foundation (ran by a publishing-house) from the Phillipines. They run a bunch of interesting projects, like a Wikipedia-like site with more relaxed rules, and do this in the spirit of their local needs and circumstances, like being a formerly oral culture. Also the talks by Stephen Downes and Anne Østergaard were interesting.

And last but not least there was a speech of Richard Stallman again, at the beginning of the conference, on the first day. During the question-round he was ehm; quite harsh and sometimes even hostile (must admit that some in the audience were a bit so too). But afterwards we did get a chance to talk a bit: what it comes down to is that while Stallman does see possibilities for freedom in Web-/ Software-as-a-service-communities, he believes this freedom to be a lesser, and thus not a good (or no) freedom to strive for. In this sense he still thinks one should not rely on another’s machine to “do calculations with ones data”, with which, I think we disagree on 2 points:

• First of all this “lesser freedom of the web” is not so much less. As we proposed it: all code of the web-app under the Affero GPL, all content under a CC-By-Sa license, and rights for the user-community over the running application. Freedom on these 3 planes allows the community to determine it’s course, and to leave and start anew (exodus/fork) in case this fails or there is no agreement possible. Pretty close to the rights of citizens in good societies I would say.
• Secondly the web is good and useful, and can do things desktop pc’s can’t do. For example be accessed on any device and machine, anywhere, give users ease of not having to install and update the software, model social networks that can be collaboratively extended, and allow for all kinds of rating, tagging and sharing. In short the web is not evil, the web is just social, and when the serf-like conditions that many Web2.0 app-users are under now (they’re even being sold wit the app, as serfs were sold with the land in historic times) are replaced by social freedoms, the web will be a better place.

In short: social software requires social freedoms. Discuss it with us on LogiLogi.

The RMLL was a really cool & interesting event. The atmosphere rocked, and there were plenty of good & interesting people around :) Sadly enough I could not speak with many of them, and follow even fewer talks, as the RMLL was French, very French. I did not expect this as they announced it as an international event. But I should have guessed it as they used the word “mondial”, instead of “global” ;) Anyway, their friendliness made up for this, really. Very friendly & caring pplz at the event. Definitely go there if you can, even if you only speak Arabic.

Besides ours on LogiLogi ;), there was one especially interesting presentation, it was on Sophie. It is a desktop app, and meant for creating books. They can contain video’s, be scripted, auto-play through timelines, act like presentation-slides and be exported to the web. Interesting, but no web-app of course…

We gave 2 presentations at the RMLL 2008, the first was on Tuesday the 1st and it was about LogiLogi, our plans to split up LogiLogi into separate webservices, and 2 debates that we were going to have during the week via LogiLogi. The first of the debates was about the future of Free Software on the Web 2.0. And the other about LogiLogi itself. Our second presentation was a short introduction to LogiLogi and a report on the results of the debate. The slides can be downloaded here and here – the second, on the Future of Free Software on the web. The video of our presentations will be available in some weeks, and both our presentations were also broadcasted live in entire France via the Freenews TV-channel! They will be there all summer in their program-loop :-)

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation was also at the conference. I had a chance to quickly discuss our/my ideas on Free Software on Web2.0 with him. As he thinks very differently about them. According to what seems to be his view, one should only use one’s own computer for one’s own “calculations”. Sad. We think the web is not evil, freedom at the Web-community-level is possible, and that it matters. He told us he would be at our presentation to take part in the live debate, but he could not make it in the end because of an interview.

Hope we can discuss this later, at the FKFT in Barcelona, where Stallman and I will meet again. Freedom on the Web should not be ignored. Currently our views are quite far apart, like on this picture.

The LogiLogi discussion platform is still our main project.

Version 3 of the Affero GPL has just been released by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). It seems that the FSF is endorsing the Affero GPL more openly now than they used to: “The FSF recommends that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network”.

It seems now finally the FSF is no longer taking sides in the sense in which Archis – even if currently working for Microsoft – already stated in his GPLv3: Is Stallman taking sides.

Nevertheless I still wonder if and in what ways Stallmans own views might have changed or might be changing in his upcoming article on this matter.

But regardless; we are happy with the new license, and after reading it carefully, we decided to use it for OgOg and LogiLogi Manta as it reflects our views on Free Web-software better than version 2.

Let’s hope the FSF as of now continues to be as much for Freedom on the Web as we are.

When I sent Why Freedom Matters for Web 2.0 to Richard Stallman, it basically only contained a link to the video of my presentation about freedom and the web at T-Dose 2007. He then replied to me that it was inconvenient for him to download and play (OGG)-video’s on his machine, so hereby for him, and for all of you, the substance of the presentation written out. For those who want to view the video and can’t play OGG but other formats, try Google video, but keep in mind what you just did, while watching or reading.

Why freedom matters for the web ? Many acknowledge the importance of Free Software; code that one can use for any purpose, modify and share, because of the freedoms it ensures. But now with the growth of Web 2.0, more and more software runs on remote servers and via the Web-Loophole in the GPL this means that it does not need to be free from the viewpoint of normal users (no access the code on remote servers), even if GPLed. Nor does it in principle need to be free in this broad sense according to Stallman’s current views (which can be found here). Why this is a problem, and why I think that Freedom does matter for the web I will now explain. For this I will first try to make clear what this so called Web 2.0 could be.

Web 2.0 can be understood as a division of labor for the web itself. Functions that used to be there in many sites, like the front-page, the profile-page, search, pictures, a login, avatars, etc., are now becoming separate services like Digg, one’s Blog, Google, Flickr, OpenID / MS Passport, and Gravatar to name a few. These are essentially pie-sliced applications that in varying degrees can be tied together in mashups, not unlike to how small, specialized programs can be piped together in the Unix philosophy.

Freedom matters, not just for software like your Operating System or Firefox, but also for live web-applications. And with more and more functionality and social uses of software moving to the web it will soon only matter more.

About this was my talk at the T-Dose conference of one and a half week ago. I only now come to write about it as my (Wybo’s) father died just 10 days before the conference, and I’ve spent much time with my family since then. And yet even after this unsettling confrontation with the uncertainties of life, freedom for the Web still matters to me.

The presentation first goes into the nature of Web 2.0, and why freedom matters there. Then follows an intermezzo about our project LogiLogi Manta, which is nearing completion. After that it tells about the tendency of many – and especially a certain well known search-engine from Mountain View – to be open at every level except where it would matter most; their own level. Then the distinction is made between 3 planes of freedom for the web; code, data, and community- rights. Two of these 3 levels of freedom go beyond the already much more widely acknowledged importance of Free Software.

So if you have 30 minutes to spare, I would say; have a look at the presentation for yourself. A video is online here in the Ogg-format (If you’re not Dutch you can skip the first 2 minutes of the video, my talk is in English as of that point), and here is a different video in mov-format. A google-video is upcoming ;)

The sheets can be browsed or downloaded as a pdf.

Besides this the conference was great with interesting people like Bas de Lange of Software Freedom Day and Oliver Cleynen of GNU/Linux Matters. Oliver held a talk that is of interest too in the context of Freedom and Freedom for the Web. It can be viewed here

Today OgOg received ‘I-have-already-voted’-checks. One is now allowed to vote for each post at maximum once a week. This law-in-code became necessary as more people joined OgOg.org today, and some of them liked to experiment with what would happen if they gave dozens of 5-star (unsurpassed) ratings to their own posts… ;)

Also I applied some tweaks to the layout of OgOg. I hope you like it.

And for something completely different; the development of LogiLogi Manta is proceeding nicely, but it’s a bit delayed. I hope to finish the code-simplification process this week, so we can integrate the stuff made by the Nijmegen-team around next weekend. Let’s hope we get an up-to-date pre-alpha online soon…

Most web2.0 software is community-software. Software around which a virtual community forms. People writing, talking, socializing, and presenting themselves through carefully crafted identities. These identities and their belongings can be quite valuable to us, whether directly or indirectly through the time and effort we invested in them. But to what extent are we free to do what we want with our creations on the web ?

What can we do, and what not on the web ? Most likely there will be policies on sites about what is ok, and what a nono. These are what most of us would see as examples of regulations. But are there any other ? Yes we think so, there is the software itself: enabling some things, making other things hard, and making zillions of things even plain impossible. The software running on the server is effectively a law of nature in virtual communities…

Great to greet you, as a foundation, via the web now. While LogiLogi has been there for a while already, the LogiLogi Foundation did not have a site for some time. And that has changed now!

Now what is the LogiLogi foundation ?

In short we think that web2.0-apps and -communities are not too sexy to become Open Source, and we are willing to show it in practice with our projects OgOg.org and LogiLogi.org...

And you’re welcome to browse this site for the rest of it…