On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 13:10 -0500, [email protected] wrote: > If there is free software available on which I can run on my own free > hardware, then the cloud provider is not free. If the cloud provider > allows you to join their cloud using the exact same free software as > they do, then perhaps they are free. Perhaps a debate for another > topic > and time. > I think this is an overly restrictive view of freedom.
Since network services aren't free or non-free, I don't think there's much of a difference between blogspot, wordpress, and noblogs. There's a difference between "something that you can use with only free software" and "something the FSF can recommend other people use." Personally, I run my own Wordpress blog, and interact with it mostly from Emacs, but I could do the same with a blogspot or wordpress.com blog, and I don't think it would be terribly different. We're getting into territory that reminds me of early autonomo.us discussions and the Franklin Street Statement: <http://autonomo.us/2008/07/14/franklin-street-statement/> Specifically: > Service providers are encouraged to: > * ... > * Make data and works of authorship available to their service’s > users under legal terms and in formats that enable the users > to move and use their data outside of the service. This > means: > * Users should control their private data. > * Data available to all users of the service should be > available under terms approved for Free Cultural Works > or Open Knowledge. Defining network service freedom as a sort of "I can leave at any time" property (the software is free, the data is portable, I can move from wp.com to my own self-hosted instance whenever) is nice, but it fails in some cases. For example, is a BitTorrent tracker a free network service? The software might be free, but the value in a tracker comes from the people connecting to it, and that isn't something you can install locally. > Evil or good are morality > judgments and irrelevant to the free vs non-free discussion. > Is "Things can be evil while being free, and free without being good, so we need to decide if something is free or non-free independently first and avoid propagating good/evil judgments to free/non-free evaluations" a fair rephrasing of this? I (somewhat) agree, but most people on this list take free software to be a political/moral issue, and so I think this point was slightly miscommunicated here. -- Sent from Ubuntu
