Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission? [LWN.net]

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:23 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220)
In reply to: Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission? by dhess
Parent article: An "online desktop" for GNOME?

There is a free server side involved here. I've been hacking on online.gnome.org all week (it's not up yet, but see mockups), and Luis Villa is spending the balance of his Red Hat internship tackling the Free Service Definition problem. We've also got people from Creative Commons and Software Freedom Law Center and others helping out. We'll use online.gnome.org to be the first ones to adopt this and once we define what a free server side is and have our first free server side functionality, we can go from there.

We are also going to insist that the free online.gnome.org is the only "required" part of Online Desktop - I say "required" in quotes, since Online Desktop itself is an optional mode of GNOME, not a required thing.

The GNOME project is mostly a client-side project and few people in it know how to code server side stuff, so I think GNOME will mostly not be about the server side for now. But of course I would love to see free software server apps and there are tons of open source developers who know how to code them. I hope they will. I hope GNOME developers will learn eventually, too.

The essence of the GNOME Online Desktop client side to me should be choice - ability to use any server apps. That will preserve our ability to do free server apps.

A number of people have talked about using P2P or federation or <insert hand waving here> to avoid the hosting issue. While I'd love to see that, the fact is that it's insanely difficult and something of a research problem. As a result, I think it becomes an excuse; "we can ignore server apps, because they suck, we should use P2P!" - I'll be in favor of that when I see running, production, Internet-scale P2P code working with the same user benefits users are getting from server apps. Until then I think P2P is more wishful thinking than anything else. (Don't get me wrong, it works in limited domains and for limited kinds of functionality, but it seems to be impractical to replicate many of the server apps people use via P2P.)

The way to think of this is that if we want open source to be popular and want users to have a completely open source experience, we have to offer the same benefits users are getting from these server apps today. No excuses.

There is absolutely no way that allowing our client OS to become increasingly irrelevant to how people are using computers is helpful to free software. If we have a client OS that's highly relevant to what people are doing, in contrast, and people thus use the client OS, then we have the ability in the future to (for example) set the default server apps to free server apps.

If Microsoft owns the client OS, then you can imagine what the default server apps will be.

(Log in to post comments)

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:41 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

One other thing: historically, the GNU Project started by slowly replacing bits of Solaris and proprietary UNIX, because they could not do a 100% free system fully formed from scratch.

We're effectively in the same situation today. Sure there's a 100% free client OS, but I don't know anyone who uses exclusively a client OS and never uses the web. How many people do you know who don't use a search engine, or that only use a free search engine?

Pretending that today we have a 100% free computing solution is just bogus. (Virtually) nobody is using only the free part. They are all using the web.

We have to solve this problem. But it will be solved by defining what freedom means for server apps, and then coding server apps that use that definition.

It won't be solved by hoping server apps go away, because the user benefits are too large. If we refuse to adapt the desktop to how people are using their computers, that just makes the desktop suck more than it could have and ensures there's one less reason to switch from Windows.

It's not like the world will say "oh, GNOME has minimal web app integration, I guess I'll stop using web apps."

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 19:41 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Will I be able to set up my own server, and completely ignore online.gnome.org? Because anything less is lock-in. My data is going on a server I control 100%.

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 19:50 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

You can 1) use GNOME as it is now and ignore Online Desktop, 2) if we scaled down the server app, run it on the same system as your client, 3) run your instance of the server app on your own server, 4) use the online.gnome.org instance or 5) use an instance run by someone else of your choosing.

It's all hypothetical still of course, since we just started coding, but there's no reason you wouldn't have these choices.

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 19:57 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

Oh, I see what was confusing. When I said "online.gnome.org is the only required part" I was saying that the service provided by it is the only required part (for Online Desktop mode) - you need an "online desktop service" that e.g. stores what other services you are using. It's a "bootstrap" service.

However, the requirement is not for online.gnome.org specifically, just the server app that will be running there or another app that speaks the same protocol.

Also, you aren't required to use Online Desktop mode at all, so then you don't need any server, you can stick to Classic Desktop.

The point is that to make Online Desktop go you need the basic server app that stores your settings and stuff, but you don't have to use e.g. web mail or a web photo app, you can choose a la carte among those kind of services.

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 20:17 UTC (Thu) by vmole (subscriber, #111) [Link]

Thanks for clarifying - that is exactly the answer I hoped for.

And to clarify my point: it's not that I don't trust GNOME to run a server, it's that I don't trust *anyone* to provide a service that I rely on for as long as I might want to use it. Sure, my "server" is a virtual server provided by some other company, but all the data on it is backed up locally, and I could move it all in a couple of (painful) days. I'm completely mystified by people who trust huge amounts of work to Flickr, or Livejournal, or whatever.