Long before I took the train up to New York for DebConf10, I was sure that Eben Moglen's talk, the followup to his earlier, excellent "Freedom in the Cloud", would be a highlight of the conference. Even though it was scheduled for an ugly 9 am slot the morning after that other certain highlight, the wine and cheese party. I was not disappointed.
The amazing DebConf video team has already put up the video of "How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud". Embedded below for those with html5. If you watch one video from DebConf, this should be it.
(Note that the audio stops cutting in and out after he switches mics a few minutes in.)
In this talk, Eben goes far past the earlier "Freedom in the Cloud" talk, changing the focus from scraping Facebook, to laying down a concrete, detailed vision of the "FreedomBox", and how it could be a game changer.
After the first standing ovation I can remember at a DebConf, given to the first speaker in a suit I can remember at a DebConf, many of us ended up in this huddle in the hall.
Which turned into an impromptu BoF in a nearby room, which led to this wiki page, which was followed by seemingly everyone buzzing about it for the rest of the conference, and a second BoF that probably exceeded its room's occupancy limit.
Which led to ... ??
I will spend the next several months trying to find other things we can do to help make this suddenly happen. And believe me, to the rest of the world, this will happen very suddenly. We will disrupt a lot of games we would like to have disrupted.
-- Eben Moglen
My thoughts:
- Focusing on this is a tactical retreat from promoting free software on eg, desktops and cell phones. But Eben makes a good case for doing so in order to disrupt many things that are blocking free software elsewhere.
- Clearly there is much interest in Debian about helping with the FreedomBox. Many in the project have done a lot of work on supporting the target hardware, and supporting users who already do this kind of thing. If the software stack for the FreedomBox already existed, we'd be packaging and integrating it. Since it mostly doesn't, many of us are interested in developing parts of it.
- Eben seems to be looking for a technical project lead. Until someone steps up to provide some clarity and decision making, we're all sorta fumbling around the edges, in the dark. At least with the same goal in our heads. In other words, FreedomBox needs an "upstream", it can't just be done in Debian. This doesn't mean that someone (or a small group) from Debian couldn't become that project lead.
I am in the moot to brainstorm what would be needed.
-a DHT where all the freedomboxen publish their IPs (Retroshare and Emule use those)
-an dead easy way to generate/exchange GPG public keys with friends (not existant AFAIK)
-Diaspora (or something that does what they say it will do)
-a distributed file system that back ups all the (encrypted) stuff from the box to my friends (maybe http://tahoe-lafs.org)
-silent updates
-silent upgrade to new major releases (a lot harder)
-IMAP mail server with spam filter (not as resource hungry and crappy as SA)
-a good AJAXy web mail frontend (http://roundcube.net/)
-VOIP stuff
-encrypt everything
What else? (putting TOR in the first default install is not wise IMO) Not easy, but still not something the FOSS or Debian community couldn't put together. The only system administration people should be doing themselves is backing up their private key .. that might be too hard for many, but there is no way around that, or is there?
http://advogato.org/article/964.html
start at the beginning: stop after the first section. there is core technology required which will allow a much easier transition away from the client-server model.