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Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, an
by wingo 17y ago
Very interesting. This very topic was hit a number of times at last week's GNU hacker's meeting in Göteborg. If we were to come onto the scene now, as it is, and re-found the GNU project, what would the biggest priority be?
To a number of us, it seems that the priority would be to protect user's data and computing experience from the growing centralization of the web. Something like making distributed web applications, with p2p-distributed asymmetric cryptography replacing behind-the-firewall databases, and apps running in sandboxes on users' machines, in the context of their secrets, replacing e.g. facebook.com.
Someone at the conference said it best: it seems that user freedom is really at odds with the client-server model of computation. The corrolary being that net neutrality is necessary but not sufficient -- we need to increase equality of all nodes in the net, including nodes that are now just "end users".
- wmf 17y agohttp://autonomo.us/ http://autonomo.us/ has a lot of discussions of this topic.
- wingo 17y agoThanks for the link, looks like good ideas. I'll see what possible engagement there is there. The thing about the GNU project now -- speaking for myself, not for the project -- is that we have a few hundred really good hackers, and we're done making a Unix clone. We need something new. This kind of thing sounds like a good direction.
- xcombinator 17y agoA very good idea. Start growing an open source web platform.
- wingo 17y ago"Open source" doesn't have much to do with it :) More substantially, "platform" usually implies centralization, even if your platform can federate. It's probably more useful to envision a radical solution (<i>to the root</i>), and start thinking about how to get there.
- zacharypinter 17y agoI've had similar thoughts in the past and brought them up on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625917 Ironically, wmf made the same comment about http://autonomo.us/ http://autonomo.us/ then :)
- wingo 17y ago> * Distributed File System (all data public, private data gets encrypted) > * Sandboxed Map Reduce > * Public keys as account identifiers Yes, my initial thoughts are almost exactly the same. I'm beginning to think it's a common idea. This bodes well :)
- loup-vaillant 17y agoBut first, we should get rid of the "A" in ADSL. Asymmetric bandwidth is a major contributor of centralization: It makes rapidShare faster than bittorent, and Blogger more convenient than self-hosting, among other things.