| > The question is, when you say "it's time", how do you make it happen I'd say a good starting point would be something akin to the GNU project for protocols and services. Stallman's work made alignment with a particular set of principles the overriding goal of software development, and as much as this is often regarded as an extreme position for prioritizing ideals over the practical value of the software, it's hard to deny that it certainly shifted the 'center' of discourse to a point that gave enough weight to user freedom to enable a thriving ecosystem of open-source software that satisfies both practical use cases and the ideals of software freedom well enough. We've seen a lot of one-off projects that have attempted to create distributed, user-centric services and protocols - OpenID, Diaspora, etc. - but these haven't aligned into an overarching "open internet movement" where projects build upon each other's work, or endeavored to promote a unified vision of the open internet. Basically, the principles of an open internet ought to be articulated in a coherent statement of purpose - something akin to the FSF's "four freedoms" - and attached to some effective branding. The ideal needs to become a meme. Marketing the idea of the open internet shouldn't be too hard: there are already plenty of examples of people's lives and workflows being severely disrupted by service shutdowns, business-model restructuring, security breaches, and so on, to which outsourced non-commodity software-as-a-service offerings are uniquely susceptible. When we look at the kinds of practical concerns that have lead to this structural milieu - i.e. the situation in which service vendors are actually able to shoehorn their users into walled gardens - the single factor that pops out is the fact that the service vendor itself is in control of the platform on which the server operates, and can therefore modify the structure of the application or protocol without restraint. The first order of business for a practical solution, and the first kind of product that ought to be developed, is something that breaks that combination, and gives users a level of control over the web applications they use that's akin to what they expect for desktop apps. What if everyone had their own VPS, with a user-friendly UI to install and configure server-side applications, that give them the ubiquitous access and ease-of-use they're currently getting from webapps while still leaving them in control of their own user experience, and allowed them to choose what products to install, what versions of those products to use, and what features to enable? A VPS-as-end-user-platform model would break the current platform/service combination that lends itself to walled gardens, and allow the VPS providers to compete on price and quality of their commodity service, while application developers would compete to encourage users to install commercial or free web-based RSS readers, OpenID implementations, social-networking nodes, email clients, etc. onto their own VPS instances. |