FSF Helps Launch Autonomo.us To Focus On Freedom In Network Services

mako writes "The FSF just announced the results of a meeting it held on software freedom and network services. They are hailing the launch of a new group called Autonomo.us to follow up on these issues and the publication of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services which lays out a set of recommendations and guidelines for protecting freedom for software as a service." Update 22:07 GMT by SM: Corrected language incorrectly crediting FSF with creating Autonomo.us.

Comments

Good domain name

[nine-times]

This may be a bit off-topic, but my initial response to the headline was, "That's pretty clever, but I'm surprised someone hadn't already registered it." It seems like every word ending with a "us" got bought a while back when people first figured that whole thing out.

So out of curiousity, I went looking to see what was at some of those websites. They're all ad pages-- nothing is at any of them, really. It's a sad state of affairs with DNS that there has been such a land-grab and so many domains are taken by people whose only intention is to put up some filler ad pages in the hopes that someone might happen along.

Eh, anyway, it's nice to see someone got ahold of one and are using it for something.

No, u

[tietokone-olmi]

Your mistake is in assuming that the user is a passive consumer. This would seem to be just your conforming to the ideas pushed by the proprietary software industry, which has sought for the past four decades to make the users of their products as passive and helpless as possible.

Your other mistake is in assuming that because far less than one percent of users make noises about wanting to modify the source code of whatever, that 99% don't want to.

The interesting thing is, though: why would you want the FSF to not make noises about things like this? Would you perhaps like all users to be passive and helpless? Or is this an "open source"-like compromise proposal, where the FSF makes exceptions to their principles in exchange of vaguely defined and ultimately useless "credibility".

Re:New flash: not everyone thinks like a geek

[TheRaven64]

I think you are missing something, and that is that the ability to modify the source code is the means not the end. If you don't have this ability, then you are subject to vendor lock-in, which is something most people in businesses do understand irrespective of whether they are geeks. You have no second source (something else they understand). Something that may be critical to your ability to compete is under the control of a single external organisation (and you can bet they understand this one). It doesn't matter to a business that they can't modify the code, it matters that more than one company is competing to do it for them, giving them lower prices (something else they understand).