I’ve always had mixed feelings about Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu GNU/Linux. While they’ve made great contributions to free software, they’ve also been very inconsistent in their commitment to software freedom. Mark Shuttleworth’s response to the privacy concerns in Ubuntu 12.10 has fundamentally shattered my trust. An Uneasy History From […]
Free Software
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This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email, feed reader. Of all Google services, you’d think the hardest to replace would be search. Yet, although search is critical for navigating the web, […]
This post is part of a series in which I am detailing my move away from centralized, proprietary network services. Previous posts in this series: email. Next to email, replacing Google Reader as my feed reader was relatively easy, though I’ve chosen to use the move as an opportunity to […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders included in Facebook’s IPO filing contains a pretty bold vision for Facebook to not just connect people and enable them to share, but to fundamentally restructure the way that the world works: By helping people form these connections, we […]
I’ve begun to write about free (libre) network services, and the hazards of being a tenant on the web instead of a property owner. I began slowly moving away from Google in 2009, but I’ve accelerated that process since the launch of Google+. I thought I’d begin to share my […]
Via the FreedomBox Foundation, J David Eisenberg has created a great comic introduction to distributed social network services. Distributed systems are an important part of free network services.
There are many things I like about Google+, but, beyond being yet another proprietary social networking service, something just doesn’t sit well with me about Google’s primary purpose. Comments by Brad Horowitz that Google+ will be connected to everything Google are a good example of what concerns me: Google+ is […]
A couple years ago, I would have said that network services and mobile computing were two new frontiers for software freedom, two new challenges, two new battles. But, despite some key differences, these two areas are so closely related and that I think we need a unified vision for addressing […]
I’m increasingly critical of network services — software that you use on someone else’s server to do your own computing. We rely on computers more and more for our work, social lives, civic engagement, health, education and leisure, and more and more that means relying on networking services rather than […]