We may end up releasing standalone version of Portal as open source that lets technical users run everything themselves. But that doesn't help regular people an

We may end up releasing standalone version of Portal as open source that lets technical users run everything themselves. But that doesn't help regular people and it doesn't solve the problem of renting a server from a trustworthy host. The biggest issue is lock in, not proprietary vs open source. It's okay that Facebook is proprietary, but we don't think it's right that you can't switch from Facebook to a new social network, without losing most of your data. They create intentionally broken data exporting systems to keep people locked in. They can only do this because they hold all of the data we've given them. With Portal users control all of the data themselves, so they can give it to any new app they want to use. And they can even export their entire Portal environment and take it to another provider entirely. Thanks for the feedback!