[hosay123]

I've long dreamed of a resurgence in the open source community, attacking big media much as the community attacked Microsoft in the late 1990s. It's depressing that the PR machine has so thoroughly succeeded that most of those who still call themselves "geeks" now consider building throwaway hacks on big media services cooler and more meaningful than coordinated efforts to replace the services themselves (in the name of serving some ideals much greater than say, amateur entrepreneurialism).

Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with.

I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.

[mlinksva]

Free-as-in-freedom replacements for many services do exist. By and large nobody knows about them, perhaps because the community isn't unified on the issue like it was against Microsoft, as you point out. I'm not sure privately working toward cloning services is a good way out of this situation. :)

autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it.

You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.

[hosay123]

Thanks for the link, will check it out. GNOME was the first environment I used that had cohesive e.g. system preferences across the environment, and later a consistent update process (if I remember it right, Ximian were the first to include an updater in GNOME).

Half the battle isn't producing the software, it's ticking all the boxes that make people "go cloud" in the first place – you never need to run software update for Google Docs, you simply don't need to care about it.

What I'd love to see is a Ximian-styled system where you could subscribe to some release cycle (bleeding edge, 6 months behind, long term support), and behind the scenes a vast team of idealist monkeys worked to provide some of that cloud comfort – at the very lest, security updates.

The concept can be extended to quite elaborate proportions. But the low hanging fruit - let an admin create user accounts, let users login painlessly, and figure out how to make updates work safely & painlessly - and I believe half the war would already be won.

[npsimons]

As others have noted, the pieces are already (mostly) there, they just need to be put together properly. FreedomBox is one effort in this direction, and they've already got an eye on XMPP, at least for chat. I don't know about extending it, but that is where I would start. IIRC, XMPP was created in response to the last time chat was balkanized; remember ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc, etc, etc?

[elimisteve]

One solution is to use Google Docs and more, but to only store encrypted data there. This gets you the convenience of SaaS without the privacy issues (see http://rdist.root.org/2011/05/09/encrypted-google-docs-done-...).

Priv.ly has an interesting approach to this somewhat analogous to the above: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/229630898/protect-your-c...

Tent is a protocol for distributed social networking that I'm very optimistic about. You can message me at https://elimisteve.tent.is (sign up at tent.is).