First Steps Toward Free Network Services

Recently, the FSF convened a meeting to discuss the questions for network services and the issues that they pose for software freedom. The description of the event said:

The last decade has witnessed a rise in the role of computing as a service, a massive increase in the use of web applications, the migration of personal computing tasks to data-centers, and the creation of new classes of service-based applications. These shifts have raised a host of important questions for the advocates of free software. For example, by separating use and distribution of software, these models have in some cases reduced the effectiveness of GNU GPL-style copyleft which treat modified web applications as if they were private software. Much more importantly, the movement of software off of personal computers has reconfigured power relationships between users and their software and complicated questions of ownership and control in ways that free software advocates do not yet know how to address.

What does freedom mean for the users and developers of web services? What is at risk? What should the free software community, and the Free Software Foundation, do to ensure that software, and its users, stay free in this new technological environment?

Many problems associated with web services were discussed as were a range of responses. Different group members offered strong and differing ideas about both. There was0 consensus within the group, however, that the impact of the rise of network services on software freedom is not yet even fully understood and that further discuss and a more public accessible venue was necessary.

The most important step for summit participants was to help advance an understanding of the problems introduced by network services and to their impact and of the means by which they can be addressed. In attempting to do so, the participants produced a large amounts of notes and examples which, over the coming months, will be refined into a set of reports and essays and published.

The group will continue to work together, and with the larger free software community, over the next months to help refine this knowledge base about issues of free network services and to publish a series of essays, histories, case studies, and position papers. With time, the group hopes that this discursive and deliberative dialog will lead to a series of positions that the FSF and other organizations can adopt in relations to network services and software freedom.

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