[Freedombox-discuss] Introductions

[mjj29@debian.org (Matthew Johnson)]

On Sat Aug 28 21:11, paxcoder wrote:
> On 08/28/2010 06:30 PM, Sam Hartman wrote:
>> We should not forget that as we're promoting the technology for people
>> to maintain their own information, we also want to promote business
>> models that are compatible with that information.
>>    
> You're missing the aim of the project entirely. We will make FREEDOMbox  
> to enable more private, secure networking for persons. Have you watched  
> Moglen's talk[1]? It's not about making a cheap server and selling it to  
> companies. If it were, we'd probably be non-free and provide services  
> like UbuntuOne. We won't.

Well, I was in that talk at the time (as was Sam) and actually I agree with Sam
here - but of course there are some provisos.

Firstly - this is a project to build an actual device which we want to ship on
store shelves - of course there is going to be business involved somewhere.

Secondly - the aim of the project is to enable privacy, freedom and choice for
the users - but that does not constrain it to not use the cloud or commercial
services, as long as it still meets those goals. As an example of how we can do
both - people using their freedombox to store encrypted backups on a commercial
provider's servers. The user has the choice of which company to use, their data
is private because it's encrypted, it's secure because they have a second copy
at home (it's a backup) and they are free to move between providers at will.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't work on cooperative storage between freedom
boxes, but it also means we should not discard any proposal because there is
commerce involved.

Actually, I think things like secondary MXs, smart hosts and other services
could have the option of being hooked through commercial services. As long as
you're not tied to a single provider and the FB arranges that everything is
encrypted while it's in the cloud, then it's still maintaining your privacy.

In fact, for some data we can go even further. I have data I want to publish
without restriction. Photos on my gallery, my website. I also want that to be
publically available and not slow to access because it's on my ADSL upload
bandwidth. For this I have decided I want the world to access it. I don't mind
if some company can read it all - it's on my public website, of course they can
read it all - it's indexed in Google. If I want to pay someone to arrange that
they deal with the uptime and transfer rates for that, that's fine. What we
need to arrange is that noone is tied to a single provider for it and the user
is control of what's published and what's not.

Matt
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