Karsten on Free Software

For today’s I love Free Software Day, I’ve thought a little about what makes me get behind the keyboard every morning. Turns out there are lots of reasons, but here are two of them.

The great thing about Free Software is that it gives me control of my own life. I want to be able to shape the way I live. Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to rule the world. But I want to be in control of my own little slice of it. If I’m using machines to help me achieve things, I want to know how they work and what they’re doing. I want sovereignty rather than dependence. There are so many things in the world that need changing, and no way for me to change them all. But Free Software gives me an easy way to take charge of the tools that I use to work, to create, and to relate to others. That’s a great feeling, and it inspires me to tell others about it.

And then there are the people who I get to work with, from the Free Software community and beyond. They’re a very smart bunch, and I get to learn something new almost every day. Our community is a place where we push each other hard to succeed. It’s a place where we can throw ideas into the discussion before they’re fully thought out, and then work together to make them great. Or throw them out if they’re no good, which is just as well. The only real failure is not having fresh ideas any more. If you see FSFE doing something good, then you can safely assume we threw out ten other ideas in the process of settling on that one good proposal.

Free Software lets me change the world, side by side with truly inspiring people. That’s why I love Free Software.

This Monday we pushed out a press release about the distributed Free Software search engine YaCy. This PR saw impressive take-up around the world, and generated quite a bit of attention. Perhaps inevitably, some articles branded YaCy as a “Google killer”.

As covered by articles at Web Pro News and the Wall Street Journal‘s tech blog, that’s the wrong way to look at YaCy, and at distributed systems in general. It’s not about “killing” this or that company or service. Here’s what I told those journalists who took the time to dig a little deeper:

YaCy isn’t a challenge to Google, and is a long way from becoming one. It’s not even intended to challenge Google. What it is is a new, exciting approach to web search that empowers users.

Right now, Microsoft and Google are the only two significant companies left that do web crawling on a massive scale. Even when you use a different search portal, there’s a fair chance that the results come from one of those two. Both Google and Microsoft’s Bing are huge crawling operations, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

YaCy’s selling point (if you will) is not that it delivers better results faster than Bing or Google — it currently doesn’t do that. It’s the fact that it’s a distributed, peer-to-peer system.  With YaCy, there is no central server that can fail. There is no central instance that can decide to show some results and not others, or how to rank the results.

Instead, each user gets to make these decisions locally. The portal at search.yacy.net is just a limited demonstration. To get the full experience, you have to install YaCy locally (this usually takes no more than a minute). Then your computer will be part of the YaCy network, and you will be able to draw on the whole network for search results.

At FSFE, we find YaCy highly interesting because it’s part of a trend to replace centralised systems with distributed ones. We have Diaspora and other distributed social networks as an alternative to Facebook. We have identi.ca and its status.net platform as an alternative to Twitter, which users can install and run on their own servers. YaCy is one of less than a handful (to my knowledge) of distributed search engines.

We maintain a list of distributed projects in many categories in FSFE’s wiki. If you know one that’s missing, please let us know. If you’re a Fellow, you can edit the page directly.

And here’s the conclusion:

So, no, YaCy isn’t a “Google killer”, as some of the more excitable journalists out there have claimed. It’s an innovative, distributed search engine that empowers users. Neither FSFE nor YaCy have the desire to “kill” Google. Instead, I’d be happy to see the company put its massive number of engineers to work on distributed systems, and its strategy folks to figure out how to make money from this next great wave, while giving power and freedom to the users.

Today we published a press release about a distributed Free Software search engine: YaCy 1.0.  At FSFE, we don’t usually do press releases about new software. But this time, it’s about a broader point: The rise of distributed systems.

There are more and more Free Software projects that replace centrally run services with distributed ones. For example, identi.ca (running on status.net) offers a Free Software alternative to Twitter; diaspora  and many others provide a free, distributed alternative to Facebook; and so forth.

Now YaCy fills a significant gap: A free, distributed search engine.

Search is a basic function of what we do on the web. Everyone of us does dozens, if not hundreds of web searches per day. Search engines determine what we see of the web, and what effectively remains hidden.

If a search engine is run by a single company, that company gets to decide how the results are generated and how they are ranked — in short, what you see, and what you don’t.

That company will also know what you’re currently interested in.  The search terms you type in tell others a lot about what you’re up to. Targeted advertising is only the most benign use of this data.

YaCy works differently. It runs on each user’s computer, not on a server somewhere. It builds its own index of search results.  Normally you share this search index with other YaCy users, but you can also decide to keep the index for yourself.

In this way, each user gets to fully control their own search engine.

It’s in the nature of this technology that at this early stage, results are better on some (usually computer-related topics) than others. This will improve as more users join and the network increases beyond its current ca. 600 peers. Remember the early days of Wikipedia? There was a similar phenomenon, but the gaps were soon filled.

So, go download YaCy, install it on your computer, and become part of the freeworld network!

At the excellent (as usual) FSCONS conference in Gothenburg today, Erik Josefsson gave a talk about Free Software politics in the European Parliament. He mentioned some very useful tools that help us keep track of what’s going on in the parliament, and use our influence to change Europe’s politics for the better, one decision at a time.

Those tools are:

ParlTrack – “combines dossiers, MEPs, vote results and committee agendas into a unique database and allows the tracking of dossiers using email and RSS. Most of the data displayed is also available for further processing in JSON format. Using Parltrack it’s easy to see at a glance which dossiers are being handled by committees and MEPs.”

Pippi Longstrings – lets you keep track of blocks of texts and standing expressions as they get copied and pasted from one policy document to another.

Political Memory – run by La Quadrature du Net, it provides a “toolkit for finding information about Members of European Parliament (MEPs), including contact info and votes related to Internet issues.”

These tools are wonderful, based on Free Software, and developed and run by very dedicated people. They’re very good at collecting data from the parliament’s own website and a variety of other sources. But it’s a shame that we even need them. The European Parliament is a body that is supposed to represent us all. Information about policy decisions that affect us all should be made publicly available by default.

Europe’s citizens should not be forced to scavenge for information that they have a right to.

How long should copyright last? Should living beings or software be patentable? How do we as a society manage our knowledge? The World Intellectual Property Organisation deals with this sort of question. This associated organisation of the United Nations serves as a forum for the countries of the world to negotiate treaties like those that make it illegal to circumvent Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). These treaties are then implemented by WIPO member states – that’s almost all countries in existence. So rules made at WIPO trickle down to all of us. The treaties that made it illegal to break DRM were implemented in Europe as the European Union Copyright Directive, and in the US as the DMCA.

Since 2004, the Free Software Foundation Europe is pushing at WIPO for a better global knowledge order. Our most important demand is that when it comes to copyright and patents, the benefits should be weighed against the cost. Many member states and the (extremely strong) industry lobby at WIPO portray these artificial monopolies on ideas as an end in themselves. In reality, copyright and patents are just two tools out of a whole toolset to promote innovation and creativity.

(If you happen to understand German, here is an interview (.mp3; sorry, no .ogg available) on the subject that I did with a German radio station today.)

Unfortunately, the current trend at WIPO is in the opposite direction. We had high hopes for the new Director General Francis Gurry, who took office in 2008. He took some steps in the right direction. For example, he hired a Chief Economist for the first time, tasked with investigating the reality in WIPO member states and assessing the effects of the rules that WIPO makes. (Yes, you read that right: There was nobody at WIPO doing that before then. No kidding.)

By now these hopes are out the window. Gurry’s remark in June 2011 that the World Wide Web would have been better if it was patented were just the final proof that like those before him, he cares only about maximising the reach of monopolies on ideas. A remarkable triumph of ideology over evidence, indeed.

So at FSFE we will have to keep pushing at WIPO. Things there move slowly, but with enough help, we can push them in the right direction: Towards a better knowledge order for all. Your support and help with this are very welcome.

Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Next Big Thing (TM) for Facebook: OpenGraph. In a typically glowing article, Wired sums it up as follows:

an initiative that will allow thousands of developers to make social applications tightly woven into the Facebook system, much more so than with the existing platform. Media applications in categories like music, news, and video will not only be able to instantly make their content more valuable as friends share what they’re reading, watching and listening to with each other, but the media itself will seem to be part of Facebook. Though media apps are prominent among the F8 launch partners, however, Facebook expects people to write programs that involve every imaginable aspect of life.

The result Zuckerberg is hoping for is that people will leave  a detailed record of every aspect of their lives on Facebook’s servers. Sure, you will be sharing thosed details with your “friends”; but in the end, it will always be Facebook that determines who can see those details.

The service may be convenient. But in effect, Facebook will be acting as its own private Internet.

Only that it won’t be like the Internet. The Internet is decentralised. There’s no single choke point where it can be controlled and censored. As John Gilmore said in 1993, the Internet “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

So can you.

There are lots of projects out there that will do the same things that Facebook does, and much more. The crucial difference is that these projects put you in control. This is the basic idea of software freedom: That you should be able to control your own computing.

In the Fellowship wiki, there’s list of a lot of these projects. Go try them out. See if you can contribute to one of them. Or if you don’t like any of them, perhaps you can start your own. Just make sure it can talk to the others. Oh, and if  you know of other Free Software projects building distributed systems, add them to the list.

So start using at least one of these projects today. You owe it to yourself.

Because from Facebook’s perspective, you are not the customer. You are the product.

Yesterday evening in Berlin, there was a rare meeting of the heads of three different FSFs: Richard Stallman (FSF US), Nagarjuna G (FSF India) and myself for FSFE. With us were FSF India volunteer damitr and FSFE intern Nicolas Jean.

We did discuss some weighty issues, such as the relation between Free Software and Open Data. But mostly we just had dinner and a good time.

Now it’s official: The European Commission will migrate to Microsoft Windows 7 without considering alternative offers. In a reply to questions asked by MEP Bart Staes (Greens/EFA), the EC on May 27 confirmed that it has awarded contracts for the upgrade to Microsoft and reseller Fujitsu-Siemens on behalf of 55 other European institutions and the Commission itself. [Update: link to reply moved for better visibility]

The EC had taken the decision to migrate in a closed-door meeting on December 15, 2010 (see New York Times, Jan 26, 2011). At the Free Software Foundation Europe, we have three concerns about this move: That this move will drive the EC into even greater dependence on Microsoft’s products; the lack of a public call for tender; and the migration’s effects on the Commission’s credibility with member states.

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