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The summary is completely confusing and decontextualized.

A few days ago at OSCON Shane Curcuru of Apache Foundation gave a talk: Why I don’t use the GPL which gave the standard BSD defense: I won’t use the GPL for new software, and you maybe shouldn’t either. “Heretic”, comes the cry from the back of the room! But no – I bleed and believe in open source and the public good as much as you do. The difference is, I want to share my code with everyone not just the believers.

Christopher Allan Webber is the creator of MediaGoblin. MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. http://mediagoblin.org/

He wrote an article in response to Corcuru's talk where he addressed the big failure of the BSD argument its now over 30 year track record including recently of creating platforms that are unfree using BSD software as a base. He also argued against pitting licenses against one another which is odd since he's defending a license. Webber's position is the standard GPL defense. Here is a longer article not specific to Curcuru. http://dustycloud.org/blog/fie...

Anyway the standard time tested argument but the summary was terribly unclear about who was talking to whom.

THEY don't want IPv6 implemented, because IPv6 easily ensures that everyone and their evil twin can have a fully-accessible IP address, allowing them to directly communicate with each other without paying extra rent to the ISP for a "server" or "special" (routable) IPv4 address.

If users' systems can directly communicate with each other, there's far less need for centralized sites for everything where it can be controlled (for example, YouTube for video). Deep packet inspection is an option to spy on people looking for copyright trespassers or subversives, but with encryption becoming more readily available, that gets harder, too.

When anybody who wants to can set up (or even buy "canned") a media appliance running something like "MediaGoblin" to share audio, video, text, photos, etc., or VoIP servers like Mumble or various WebRTC-based systems for conferences and "phone calls" and other audio, servers for federated instant-messaging systems or "social media" platforms, etc. etc., and just assign those systems one of the overflowing bucket of publically-routable IPv6 addresses that everyone can have, it'll remove a huge amount of control that big media and telecommunications corporations (and governments) currently have. They don't want that.

Don't try to tell me it's not true, I can hear 'em talking about it on the radios the CIA implanted in my teeth.

But, seriously, my lazy, cheap, asshat phone company can't/won't give me more than one publically-accessible static IP address, probably really because of the ancient crappy DSL modem/router they force us to use and not being willing to have their executives skip lunch for one or two days to pay for the infrastructure upgrades.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean it's not a secret conspiracy on a global scale overall, though...

And I think the absolutely best chance of success would be if one made a social "network" that allowed one to share (and possibly monetize your own) content - think Youtube, but distributed and not limited to movies but to everything - pictures, audio, video, blog posts etc. :)

Best way to accomplish that using current technology would be to use BuddyCloud and replace its mediaserver with GNU Media Goblin. In the future however, it might be possible to do this without administering a physical server - it'll all be decentralised and in the cloud. That would be most convenient, but of course there are quite a few issues to resolve before then, not the least with regards to privacy...

Surprised that nobody's mentioned http://mediagoblin.org/ yet. Probably better than Youtube for a video oriented knowledge base. BTW, I don't recommend LMS'/VLE's. They're designed for controlled, linear progressions through courses and so are usually a nightmare to find random stuff on, i.e. often no global search, no filtering, no tagging, and no categories. You could always use an LMS/VLE and have MediaGoblin as a sitewide repository; best of both worlds!

Since this is a 0.7 release, I don't expect they have accomplished all the states goals yet, but the progress is promising.

The Slashdot article doesn't tell me what MediaGoblin does, or what it's for. Nether does the MediaGoblin site. The documentation, in typical Gnu syle, starts out with "how to participate" and continues with installation instructions.

It's sort of like Wordpress, but with different features and support for streaming media. There's a list of sites that use it. Of the public sites listed, all but one are demos of MediaGoblin. The first site on the list that isn't a a demo and works is this set of baby pictures. There's one site that lets you upload stuff. It's a collection of uploaded pictures with no organization.

This seems to be a publishing system for people with nothing to say.

For once, the summary actually includes a clear description of the open source product that was updated, it's a "free software media hosting platform".

And if you can't guess at the primary functions from that description, they also helpfully link the product's home page for more information.

I bitch about these sorts of summaries all the time, but this one is practically the gold standard for doing it right.

Decentralized Internet is badly needed

Very true, that is the only real solution to this problem. Whether corporations, governments, or criminals, the value in surveillance is too great to be resisted. The only solution is increasing the cost and detecting it when it happens. Decentralization will both make it more expensive to do generalized surveillance, and make it harder to do it without getting caught.

and nothing seems to be in works...

Not as true.

OwnCloud lets you host your own dropbox, mobile-to-desktop sync, etc.
MediaGoblin lets you host your own replacement for YouTube.
Asterisk lets you host an end-to-end encrypted replacement for Skype.
Tor and I2P let you slip past your ISP's surveillance net.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Learn more at Stop-Prism.org.

I suspect I can safely assume that it'll be easy for anyone (e.g. MediaGoblin or other projects) to write an interface to it. Can we also safely assume it'll support all media formats that Firefox supports natively (i.e. .ogg [vorbis], .ogv [theora/vorbis], .webm [vp8/vorbis], .opus [opus audio in ogg], and .webm version 2 [vp9/opus])?

(and, seriously, why doesn't Mozilla throw in with MediaGoblin, or perhaps start a similar project to help end-users host their own "content"? It seems like an obvious direction for Mozilla's heavy emphasis on "web video" these days.)

Anonymous Coward asked for a free software web application that replicates YouTube, perhaps something like GNU MediaGoblin. Are you looking for something that runs even on shared web hosting, or is something that requires a VPS acceptable? I imagine that a lot of web hosts don't want a bunch of CPU-heavy FFmpeg transcoding jobs to run on entry-level hosting. You probably won't be able to reach iPhone and iPad users with only free software because these devices can't play any unpatented video formats. And even then, good luck getting your own video into the "related videos" on other people's copies of this web application.

No explanation in the summary, so a quick copy/paste from the official site: "MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. "

Basically it's a "private cloud" (I hate myself for writing that) with which you can upload your photos, videos, songs, etc - so they live on /your/ server.

It is actually pretty neat. It has the usual marks of an open source product - a very, uh, functional interface that doesn't really grab you immediately. It's a little fiddly to install, but not too bad.

But it all works pretty well - I set up a test server reasonably quickly, and it performs as advertised. Getting photos and videos online is nice and easy, although there's no obvious way to upload albums - it's all one photo at a time (looks like it's at least on their TODO.

I think for it to get some solid mainstream acceptance they'll need to work on the design side - make it look beautiful and Apple-ish out of the box so that civilians are immediately awestruck with how pretty it is - otherwise they might struggle to find adoption outside of the hardcore OSS crowd.

But it's a cool idea, and it's good to see it got funding - the federation stuff will be interesting and if done correctly could really make it a good tool for media sharing.

MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.

How about wikipedia?

GNU MediaGoblin (also MediaGoblin) is a free web platform for hosting and sharing digital media,[7][8] aimed to provide an extensible, adaptive, decentralized and freedom-respectful software alternative to current art-and-media-related major internet services such as Flickr, deviantArt, YouTube, etc.[9][10]

Those both seem pretty concise to me.

It's not really developed by the GNU project. It's part of the GNU project. It is developed by some 50 people with more or less no organizational affilliation to the GNU project or the Free Software Foundation.

So far, the only person to get paid for development of GNU MediaGoblin is me - The Icelanding Ministry of Education, Science and Culture commisioned an API, which , but improveable.

However, there is currently a fundraiser going on to support one full-time project leader during a year.

Contribute!

It's software for running an upload site. It has shiny graphics, shinier than most other upload systems. The page layouts are squares in a grid, with a plain background. so it looks phone-like and trendy.

As of right now, there is one (1) open MediaGoblin site. There are also two with registration disabled, and two of (non-porno) baby pictures.

The current install setup is too complicated and requires root privileges. If this thing was made as easy to install as Wordpress, it might be more useful.

Ok, the real advantage of Youtube,Flickr, et all is that they *are* centralized. I trust a link going to those sites.

I don't trust these highlighted example sites running mediagoblin:

http://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances

There are two issues here, trusting those that own the servers flinging bits around and the codes that actually describes how the bit flinging should happen. You may trust Google and Yahoo to use their servers in supporting Youtube and Flickr, but can you really trust the code? You might trust it, but your trust is not based on anything observable since their back ends are not open source.

So the missing part here is that, well, ok, Mediagoblin supports 3D objects, that's cool, but who is going to run the repository? That Lulzbot (Aleph Objects) invested in it leads me to believe they want to run a repository. And, unlike Makerbot, those guys are* seriously open about their stuff. Release early, release often, release when designed and not after collecting XXXX dollars in preorders. They've even been sponsoring releases of Slic3r, a open-source GCode generator for 3D printing. I'm pretty pleased to have spent money with them, actually, considering they're giving back in big ways.

* well, right now anyway. Makerbot used to be a champion of open hardware, too, once upon a time. But, right now, nothing about AO seems to indicate they're going to quit being open.

Ok, the real advantage of Youtube,Flickr, et all is that they *are* centralized. I trust a link going to those sites.

I don't trust these highlighted example sites running mediagoblin:

http://wiki.mediagoblin.org/Live_instances

Video support is already here, and soon you'll be able to add plugins for almost any type of media publishing... including presentations or 3d model files. And we're planning for federation with OStatus so we can build a decentralized yet cohesive media hosting future.

(emp. mine, found here) Amazing that so many projects can't get this most basic communication right. A one sentence description should be a priority for any project, otherwise how do you know what you're making?

http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/109

GNU is working on a project to replace Flickr and such sites.

http://mediagoblin.org/

I'm saddened by the fact that Slashdot staff deliberately ostracize non-users of the proprietary security nightmare that is Adobe Flash.
Unlike open and standardized formats, Flash is not even available on most platforms.
Slashdot, do you not remember your roots?
It's 2012 and possibilities to publish video in open ways are ubiquitous.

Vimeo, YouTube - both offer HTML5 video.
Or, if you want to host on your own, use the relatively new GNU licensed MediaGoblin.