The LogiLogi Foundation

Odile Bénassy of the OFSET foundation has done the great job of translating our paper LogiLogi A Webplatform for Philosophers into French! It can be read here en Français.

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.

If you’ve been wondering what LogiLogi (Manta) is, you can now finally find a clear and short description of it, it’s philosophy and it’s relevance in this 1500-words paper:

The growth of the web has been quite invisible for philosophy so far, and while quite some philosophizing has been done about what the web could mean for the human condition, not much has been said about what it could mean for philosophy itself. An exception is some early enthausiasm for newsgroups and forums in the nineties, but that quickly died out when it became apparent that those were not suitable at all for in-depth philosophical conversations. The web as a medium however is more than these two examples of early web-systems, and in the meantime it has further matured with what some call Web 2.0, or social software (sites like MySpace, Del.icio.us and Wikipedia). Time for a second look… read on

This is the paper that we will submit to the Digital Humanities 2008 conference, where we hope to be able to present the live LogiLogi Manta in june 2008. We are still waiting for some people to finish their review of it, so we can’t yet say it’s the final version of the paper, but it won’t change drastically anymore.

And you can also have a look at our pre-alpha of the UI as it is being integrated, click here for that. This integration is something that will be done much sooner than June, but we hope to add usability-improvements and AJAX-wizzardry to make it super usable for all of us with mainly a philosophy or humanities-background, and that’s what will be done before the summer-breeze of June comes around with the conference.

And in the meantime, yes the paper is still a paper as in dead-tree-paper-simulation, not a page on a working version of LogiLogi Manta, but we’re making that happen, stay tuned or jump in and help.

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

OgOg.org has received a big code cleanup, and some new features, among which a Top 3 Posts of All Times listing, and the default listing of new posts since one’s last login. Also feeds and users are now tagged with the tags of their posts, which makes browsing the user- and feed-rankings quite interesting.

Also we are still looking for OgOg ambassadors, so have a look, get up, and lead your language :)

After the initial launch quite some non-english bloggers signed up and added their feed, and they gave us, among other things a multilingual tagcloud.

While diversity is great, and it’s true that many people do speak multiple languages, not many speak five. So the tag-cloud, and much of the site became a bit of a Babylonian language confusion, and they were not as usable as they were intended to be anymore. Also rankings could come out badly for non-english feeds using english tags, as some would vote down non-english posts.

So in order to allow the non-english-blogging of this world their playing-field, we launched five language-sites for OgOg today: Deutsch, English, Español, 日本語, and Nederlands.

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…

After our announcement on e-hub, and on a few forums, the word about ogog started to spread.

Today OgOg has been getting quite large numbers of visitors and today alone 10 bloggers signed up. Bet this is only the beginning…

Besides all this some improvements were made to OgOg in response to user inquiries:

• For the full articles you now go directly to the blogs themselves, so you get the full beauty.
• Viewpoints are now listed below posts on the frontpage as tag-viewpoints, for easy stats browsing.
• The voting-history of users & posts are visible now, so you can see who likes what you write.

Comments welcome,

Happy blogging!

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…