Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ And for people who use kiosk computers or Internet cafes, that future is already here.
For some, this is an exciting prospect. But for those, like Stallman, concerned with issues of software freedom, it is frightening. Even in the dark days of the proprietary printer driver, Stallman still had control over the computer which drove the printer, even if he did not have the source code to modify it. But with a Web 2.0 application, you don’t have even that. The computer running your software is locked away in some distant server farm. You can only communicate with it through your web browser. ”

“ Still, peer-to-peer software, if we could make it work, would seem to give the best of both worlds: the freedom to modify how a program functions on our local computers as well as the ability to share and collaborate with others across the Internet. ”

“ Some great strides have been made in building peer-to-peer software, in no small part because of the vast amount of interest in using the technology to share music without getting caught by enforcers of the law. But, especially compared to Web 2.0 server technology, peer-to-peer is still in its infancy. Writing a social application so that its peer-to-peer is about a thousand times harder than writing the same program as a web app. ”

“ But only a completely asocial web application consists purely of software. The vast majority of them are interesting because they give you access to data contributed by other users as well. For example, the software that lets people edit web pages is just about the least interesting thing about Wikipedia. The reason the site is so popular is because so many people have put their accumulated knowledge into that software. ”

“ And users, instead of passively requesting different prewritten documents, could submit requests to the server and actually begin to interact with it. Thus, they could ask the server to reserve one of the tables and send their name and phone number along with that request.
The result was that the humble web browser quickly began to overtake all the other “specialized” applications. Instead of having a special program just for reading email, people read their email over the Web. Similarly, discussion groups, chat rooms, and other forms of social interaction have moved inside the Web browser. ”

“ The success of GNU/Linux has led to a larger free software movement as well as the “open source” movement, which releases software and its source code under copyright licenses that provide some of the software freedoms. ”

“ And so, for those who care about freedom (as well as those who care about sharing music) , this seems like an important avenue for further research.
In the meantime, even if, like the question of how to query across many large SPARQL databases, the problems of web application freedom are unsolved, you can still do get started. The Open Knowledge Foundation, a group promoting freely shared databases, has proposed an Open Software Service Definition. [1] The definition essentially codifies the principles we discussed above:
1. ”

“ And there’s lots of room for experimenting in building sites that promote more Democratic control. Maybe you can try some things and tell me about them and they’ll make them into the second edition of this book. ”