FreedSite

From LibrePlanet
Revision as of 13:02, 8 March 2009 by Dclark (talk | contribs) (Added notes from cluestick)
Jump to: navigation, search

This page is in progress and isn't intended to make much sense to people other than user:Dclark yet. It should be fleshed out in time for a lightening talk at LibrePlanet2009.

Links

Related Wiki Pages

Related External Pages

Definitions of "Free" and "Open" in various contexts

Freed Site Definition

Probably want degrees / types of compliance like Creative Commons cc Licenses

Freed Site Early Draft Definition 0.01

  1. All configuration changes happen via changes to a source code repostiory.
  2. The entire source code repository except pieces of information that are private or are auth tokens is available to the public.
  3. The live versions of all configuration files that differ from those installed by packages are exposed in the source code repostiory.
  4. The source code packages and binary packages that are included on the machine are made available.
  5. It is possible for the user to download the site and bring it up within (eg no onerous deps)

Extended version:

  1. Can get template versions of all data
  2. Can get all non-private data

Compliance Web Button

Made with http://cssbutton.com/maker/ 

<a href="http://freedsite.org">
    <span style="background: #fff; 
                 padding: 1px; 
                 font-family: Silkscreen, Geneva, Vera, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; 
                 font-size: x-small; 
                 border: 1px solid #999999;">
      <span style="color: #000000; 
                   background: #a76bcf; 
                   padding: 0px 3px 0px 3px;">
          FREED
      </span>
      <span style="color: #a76bcf; 
                   background: #000000; 
                   padding: 0px 22px 0px 3px;">
          SITE
      </span>
    </span>
</a>

Trademark Registration

If this idea becomes popular, should probably apply for trademark so it continues to mean what is decided on by the community:

Misc Notes

Update if/when ready

To update when live:

The 2-clause BSD of Network Services

"Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn@softwarefreedom.org> user:Bkuhn in "GPL, The 2-clause BSD of Network Services" writes:

We need to encourage, and more importantly, make it easy for network service deployers to make source of network applications available, regardless of their particular FLOSS license. No existing non-AGPL FLOSS licenses prohibit making the source available to network users. Network providers can and should simply do it voluntarily out of respect for their users. Developers of network service software, even if they do not choose the AGPL, should make it easy for the deployers to give source to their users.

.deb automatic source

Automatically installing source and build-deps for binary packages?

Is it possible to configure apt to force the install of source and build-deps for the exact versions of all installed binary packages?

Ideally the configuration would cause "apt-get install foo" to fail if the exact same version of the source and build-deps (and down through the chain of sources for those build-deps) could not be installed.

The use case is to have a virtual machine (virtual appliance) that is redistributable to others while being in compliance with the GPL provisions regarding the distribution of “Corresponding Source" when binaries are distributed (I see little difference between a virtual machine and a distribution like MEPIS - see http://www.linux.com/feature/55285 for details).

Note: user:Brett wrote a quick app that does this, mostly, in python... TODO put link here

Notes on how to implement franklin street statement from a technical POV

USER FREEDOM

Work from the other direction - what is technically possible?

Data Access

Taken for granted until recently because our data has always lived on local drives, or on servers we controlled. As a result, this is implied by the Free Software Definition and yet not protected by the GPL (even v3). DRM falls into this area- the software or hardware takes away your data access, and hence deprives you of the user rights. Sliding scale includes not having any data access (many web services), having access to the data, but only as a binary blob (most end-user proprietary software), or having access to the data stored in standardized or otherwise open formats.

Source Access

As noted in the Free Software definition, this is a precondition for all other user rights. Sliding scale can include (among other options) mandatory provision (GPL v2), mandatory provision and reuse (v3’s tivo clauses), or no such (BSD.)

Configuration Access

Roughly defined as the files that tell the compiled source what to do.

Hardware Access

Never much discussed because, unlike everything else here, hardware actually is scarce, and so can’t be provisioned merely by good intent or good licensing. May make some sense to discuss in the context of servers, though- for example, if all your source is available, but it can only be run on multi-billion dollar server farms, is it actually meaningfully open? Does dealing with this angle require p2p solutions, or will single-point of failure solutions (with other safeguards) be sufficient?

SkW: System Administration / Freedom / Web Services

Quotes from Hackers / Heros of the Computer Revolution / Steven Levy

The thing he [rms] liked about the AI lab at Tech Square was that "there were no artificial obstacles, things that are insisted upon that make it hard for people to get any work done - things like bureaucracy, security, refusals to share with other people."

[...] administrator of the AI lab [...] hired Stallman as a systems programmer [...]

The first incursion was when passwords were assigned to Officially Sanctioned Users [...] RMS despised passwords [...] computers he was paid to maintain did not use them.

The outside world, with its affection for security and bureaucracy, was closing in.

AI lab steadfastly refused to limit access to its computers [...] anyone could walk in off the street and use the AI machine [...]

[...] the behavior of the new "tourists" taking advantage of the freedom of the AI computer [...] did not seem as well intentioned, or as eager to immerse themselves into the culture, as their predecessors. In previous times, people seemed to recognize that the open system was in invitation to do good work [...] new users could not handle the freedom to poke around a system, with everyone's files open to them.

"More and more people come in having used other computer systems. Elsewhere it's taken for granted that if anybody else can modify your files you'll be unable to do anything, you'll be sabotaged every five minutes. Fewer and fewer people are around who grew up here the old way, and know that it's possible, and it's a reasonable way to live."

[...] not the only problem [...]

To RMS, who still believed that all information should flow freely, this was blasphemy.

The people remaining at the lab were the professors, students, and non-hacker researchers, who did not know how to maintain the system, or the hardware, or want to know. [...] Needed changes in software could not be made.

The emergence of hackerism at MIT twenty-five years before was a concentrated attempt to fully ingest the magic of the computer; to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems; to use those perfectly logical systems as an inspiration for a culture and a way of life.

TODOs

  • Think of what appropriate libre license would look like w.r.t. entire computer infrastructures (vs web services/AGPLv3 or single programs/GPLv3)
  • Get quote from maybe config-mgmt mailing list about only way of figuring out how to use software was because of accidental release of actual real-site config files (think this was Luke/puppet related)
  • Make Bcfg2 know about / be able to template everything, and have metadata available about things that are not directly available via web interface / expose entire filesystem via web interface
  • Google Summer of Code application

Ideas for Bulletin / Blog Posts

Nix Packages Bcfg2 / Puppet / autonomo.us / "freedom meter" / Arusha gNewSense Builder Prophet / Clipperz / CounchDB / etc

Developers: Think of the user's freedom, and the user's ease of sharing freedom, as the ultimate features for your project. Think of sys admins (configuration) and end users (data), not only the source code of the project itself.

Sys Admins: Make your sites available. Register (with prophet-based freedsite.org service?) - (Ontology)

cc-like ontology of both freenesses

Goal of member card: be an example of Literate System Administration

Retrieved from "https://libreplanet.org/wiki?title=FreedSite&oldid=3504"