RMS and Clipperz Promoting Freedom In the Cloud

mbarulli writes "Clipperz and Richard Stallman recently launched a joint call for action to bring freedom and privacy to web applications. 'The benefits of web apps are many, but quite often users lose their freedom to study, modify and discuss the source code that powers those web apps. Furthermore, we are forced to trust third parties with our data (bookmarks, text documents, chat transcripts, financial info ... and now health records!) that no longer resides on our hard disks, but are stored somewhere in the cloud.' Clipperz and RMS urge web developers to adopt the new AGPL license and build their applications using a 'zero-knowledge architecture,' a framework for web services that has been derived from Clipperz online password manager. A smooth path toward web apps based on free software that know nothing about you and your data."

"Zero-knowledge architecture"?

[adnonsense]

Sounds like an open-source version of MySpace (:evilgrin:).

Re:Sorry, guys

[Anonymous Coward]

What are your feelings toward spoons?

Re:Or Not

[Hairy Heron]

Exactly. It's not like anyone at RedHat gets paid or anything.

Re:Screw Stallman, the AGPL , and Clipperz

[bgat]

Why should I give away my work?

You don't.

And after reading your rant, I urge you not to.

How do you score a -1 in golf?

[GameboyRMH]

I guess you'd have to hit the ball with the back of the club while swinging backwards and get a hole in one. That would certainly deserve a -1!

Re:ajax can't do it; server bills; forking code

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they could make their users look at ads, but that won't work if the app is really user-modifiable, because someone will come out with a version that doesn't show the ads.

Let me guess... so they can't pay the server cluster to host the documents online, but "someone else" with a version that doesn't show the ads will?

Sure. There are lots of parties willing to host your documents online. NSA comes to mind, for one.

Re:If you don't want them sharing your data...

[zacronos]

Clearly, the solution to this problem is to have the US government develop sophisticated face-recognition software, then build a centralized database of people who opt-out of having their pictures posted online. The Internet will be continually spidered, and any time a picture online is found to match the identity of someone in the database, the website will get a takedown notice, and the opt-out person in the picture will also be contacted (since their contact information would of course be in the opt-out database as well) so that they can take further actions if they desire. That should take care of the problem.

... What? Why are you looking at me like that?