The Freedom Box gets off the ground

The Freedom Box is starting to roll, with a fundraising drive that met its goals in a few short days, along with a newly formed foundation to oversee its development. What started as an idea in a talk given by Eben Moglen just over a year ago has more recently gained a lot of momentum. What can we expect to see from this "personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy", and when can we expect to see it?

The "when" question may have become somewhat clearer since the "Push the FreedomBox Foundation from 0 to 60 in 30 days" Kickstarter fundraising effort has clearly been a success. The fundraising drive was set up on February 17, with the goal of getting $60,000 in donations in 30 days, but it has exceeded that—and quickly. As of this writing, there are more than 650 supporters who have donated over $64,000 in just five or six days. Based on the Kickstarter appeal, reaching the goal (and quite possibly far surpassing it) should result in a software release in six months. With luck, that means we will see the first Freedom Box release in August or so.

It should be noted that, perhaps a bit oddly, the project is called "Freedom Box", but the foundation is the "FreedomBox Foundation".

Like the Diaspora fundraising drive last May, the FreedomBox effort shows that there is a pool of money available for privacy-respecting tools and applications. So far, Diaspora, which is an attempt to provide a privacy-respecting Facebook alternative, has delivered some code and is running a private alpha. Whether Diaspora gains any sort of traction remains to be seen, but it may fall flat because the vast majority of internet users do not seem to put privacy anywhere near the top of their priority lists.

But, clearly some internet users do have a privacy focus and are willing to fund projects they see as advancing that agenda. There are also a large number of people whose privacy may be more than just a preference and is, instead, a life or death matter. For those folks, what will the Freedom Box offer? The high-level goals are spelled out on the foundation's website; the basic idea is to decentralize web applications and services, so that governments, companies, and other organizations will find it difficult to disrupt or eavesdrop on Freedom Box users' communications. To accomplish that, the project's goals are quite ambitious.

The goals

Unlike some other projects, Freedom Box is not just a software solution. It is targeting various types of low-end hardware servers to run a Debian-derived Linux system that implements its plans. The current targets are so-called "plug computers" (or "plug servers"), which are small, low-cost, low-power computers that often have the form factor of a "wall wart" power supply. These devices would be always-on gateways to the internet, with an interface that allows them to be used by both technically savvy and less sophisticated users.

While providing "safe social networking" is one of the aims of the Freedom Box, it is only part of the picture. The project wants to protect users' data as well as their communications, including internet traffic, email, and voice. Beyond that, Freedom Box is specifically targeted at routing around ISPs' restrictions on the types of traffic they will carry, as well as attempts by governments to do similar traffic restrictions. In short, the goals of the Freedom Box live up to Moglen's original vision, as spelled out in his February 2010 talk at the New York branch of the Internet Society, as well as those outlined in a more recent talk at FOSDEM 2011: it is geared towards restoring users' freedoms.

Those freedoms are best guarded by keeping our data safe within the walls of our homes, because there are typically more legal protections there than there are when storing data on some company's servers. We have already seen that companies will often bow to governmental pressure in ways that would be more difficult to orchestrate when the data is spread out across the net. To that end, Freedom Box also plans to provide ways to securely back up encrypted data on friends' and neighbors' servers. In addition, it will provide ways for those under repressive regimes to anonymously publish information, such that those regimes will find it difficult to stop or track down the publishers. If the FreedomBox is going to handle all of these kinds of things, obviously the security of the device itself is paramount, but it is also targeted at protecting other systems in the home that live "behind" the Freedom Box.

Did we mention that it is an ambitious vision? It is that, without question, and will certainly not be fully delivered in the six-month time frame. One would guess it will be a few years before it fulfills all of its goals, but those goals are important.

Development

Development, or at least planning, has been taking place on the Debian wiki's Freedom Box project page. One would guess that the infusion of some funding will accelerate the process, but there is already a fair amount of information about the parts and pieces that could come together as the Freedom Box. As Moglen has said, almost all of those pieces needed for the project already exist in one form or another. In some sense, the project will be an integration effort for many different free software projects. That part will be tricky for sure, but fairly straightforward; the harder part will be getting the user interface "right".

The Debian Freedom Box "vision statement" describes that part of the problem well:

Making all of the envisioned functionality easy to configure and use will be an enormous challenge. Focusing on just a few—or even one—hardware platform(s) will help with that process, but there are a lot of disparate pieces to be integrated—and to be made to mostly "just work". It would appear that the planning for that part has barely started, but there has been some work done on defining and describing the underlying guts of the system.

The "Design and ToDos" page outlines the base system as well as the extensions—based on existing free software tools—that will replace various "cloud" services (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Google Calendar and Reader, and so on) that are in use today. It also has a list of issues that underscores the amount of work to be done.

The base system will be based on Debian (obviously) with encrypted filesystems (which immediately raises a question about key/password management for users), a web server, AppArmor for security, a configuration system possibly based on Config::Model, and Tor for anonymous communications. The server extensions that are listed cover all kinds of different services including web-based email (Roundcube, SquirrelMail, ...), blogging (Wordpress, Drupal), file sharing (Sparkleshare, ownCloud, ...), telephony (Asterisk, Yate), social networking a la Facebook (Appleseed, Jappix, Diaspora), and so on. The extension list seems to cover most or all of the web applications and services that folks are using today, but it's a little hard to say if, for example, SquirrelMail is truly an acceptable Gmail alternative.

The project mailing list starts back in August, but the posting volume trailed off late last year. Since the advent of the FreedomBox Foundation, along with Moglen's FOSDEM talk, things have rapidly picked back up. Discussions there have mostly centered on high-level requirements, thoughts, and plans.

Funding and the role of the foundation

One of the more interesting postings to freedombox-discuss, was a transcription of an IRC question and answer session with Ian Sullivan, who is helping to coordinate the activities of the foundation. The Q&A was held on February 18 on the #freedombox channel on OFTC, and outlined some of the goals of the foundation along with the plans for the funds that are being raised:

Presumably, how the funds will be used will be dependent on how much is raised. The current plan is not to hire full-time developers—$60,000 wouldn't go very far in doing so anyway—but to use the funds as something of a seed to get more people involved. Sullivan mentioned the idea of "buying plug computers and sending them to developers who promise to work on the project" as one possibility for using the funds. But, part of the idea of the funding drive is to increase the visibility of the project and, hopefully, increase the enthusiasm of potential contributors:

Clearly the project and the foundation are in their early stages, with much left to be worked out—not just technically, but organizationally as well. The foundation's web page notes that "in coming weeks we will be announcing here the technical leads for Freedom Box and its component projects". The foundation is incorporated as a Delaware non-profit and will seek non-profit recognition by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) "as soon as the paperwork is ready", Sullivan said.

Sense of urgency

Recent unrest in the Middle East, along with Egypt and Libya governments' internet shutdowns, have clearly increased the sense of urgency in the need for a device like the Freedom Box, as the Kickstarter appeal makes clear:

In the end, $60,000 is not a lot of money for a project of this scope. Even if the amount doubles (or more) before the Kickstarter campaign ends, it's really just a drop in the bucket. Moglen was quoted in the New York Times as saying that "slightly north of $500,000" would be enough to develop Freedom Box 1.0 in a year, so one might guess that the foundation has some other fundraising plans—perhaps approaching well-heeled individuals, other foundations, or companies to make up the difference. The interest and enthusiasm shown by the Kickstarter effort may be enough to shake loose some bigger donations.

The problem that the Freedom Box is seeking to solve is real, and recent events have only helped clarify that. We will have to wait and see whether the project and foundation are successful in solving it. Even if they fail, which is an outcome few would hope for, all of the work that is done will be available to others who want to head down that path. That is just another example of the freedom inherent in free software.