free software

Purism Launches Librem One, a Suite of Privacy-Protecting, No-Track, No-Ad Apps and Services

Bryan Lunduke — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 15:00:07 +0000

Some time back, the folks from Purism sent me a question: "Would you like to record some voice-over for a little commercial we're making?"

"Sure," I say. "Why not?"

They give me a script, show me a rough cut of the footage, and I record a few lines. Easy peasy.

The only problem? The commercial was for something that I think is a really great idea. And, the finished commercial gave me a serious case of the giggles. Yet I couldn't tell anyone about it. I was sworn to secrecy.

For a person who runs his mouth for a living, secrecy isn't always so easy. Keeping my big, dumb mouth shut was downright painful. Painful, I say!

Luckily, I can now, as of today, spill the beans without getting into trouble.

Purism has just launched an online service it has dubbed "Librem One", which is, as Purism calls it, a "suite of apps and services designed to provide users with convenient alternatives to Big Tech products".

There are two components of Librem One that are offered free of cost (or, at least, choose your own price): Chat and Social Media.

The chat component—the aptly named "Librem Chat"—is built on Matrix (which I am also a big fan of) and includes end-to-end encrypted text chat plus audio and video chatting. And, since it's built on Matrix, it has access to all the other users on Matrix out there. Which may not be as big of a user pool as, say, Hangouts or something, but the user base is growing. Quickly.

The Social Media component is built using Activity Pub and Mastodon (a federated, free software social network system).

I want to pause right there a moment, because this is really interesting to me.

That means we now have a social media server that is supported via a subscription model. Not advertisements. Not data collection. Subscription. Which, in my opinion, is just a much better way to build a social network that respects user data and privacy.

Plus, this solves one of the biggest problems with picking and utilizing a Mastodon server up until this point—that they've mostly been run by hobbyists in their spare time. Thus, servers could go up or down or lose data at any time (which happened to me more than once). A professionally administered Mastodon social-media server supported as part of a subscription online service? Heck yes.

Then there are the services that aren't part of the free (in cost) tier, the ones you'll need to pay to gain access to: Librem Mail (encrypted email), Librem Tunnel (a VPN service), and, according to the Purism folks, they have plans to add a few additional services to Librem One in the future:

Go to Full Article

A Line in the Sand

Doc Searls — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

There's a new side to choose. It helps that each of us is already on it.

Linux Journal was born in one fight and grew through a series of others.

Our first fight was for freedom. That began in 1993, when Phil Hughes started work toward a free software magazine. The fight for free software was still there when that magazine was born as Linux Journal in April 1994. Then a second fight began. That one was against all forms of closed and proprietary software, including the commercial UNIX variants that Linux would eventually defeat. We got in the fight for open source starting in 1998. (In 2005, I got a ribbon for my own small part in that battle.) And last year, we began our fight against what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call re-engineering humanity.

This new fight is against actual and wannabe corporate and government overlords, all hell-bent on maintaining the caste system that reduces each of us to mere "consumers" and "data subjects" in a world Richard Brautigan described perfectly half a century ago in his poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". You know, like The Matrix, only for real.

They'll fail, because no machine can fully understand human beings. Each of us is too different, too original, too wacky, too self-educating, too built for gaming every system meant to control us. (Discredit where due: we also suck in lots of ways. For example, Scott Adams is right that we're easy to hack with a good con.)

But why wait for nature to take its course when surveillance capitalists are busy setting civilization back decades or more—especially when we can obsolesce their whole business in the short term?

Here at Linux Journal, we're already doing our part by not participating in the surveillance business that digital advertising has mostly become, and by doing pioneering work in helping the online publishing business obey the wishes of its readers.

Go to Full Article

If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

Glyn Moody — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Glyn Moody

If we pay for it, we should be able to use it.

Perhaps because many free software coders have been outsiders and rebels, less attention is paid to the use of open source in government departments than in other contexts. But it's an important battleground, not least because there are special dynamics at play and lots of good reasons to require open-source software. It's unfortunate that the most famous attempt to convert a government IT system from proprietary code to open source—the city of Munich—proved such a difficult experience. Although last year saw a decision to move back to Windows, that seems to be more a failure of IT management, than of the code itself. Moreover, it's worth remembering that the Munich project began back in 2003, when it was a trailblazer. Today, there are dozens of large-scale migrations, as TechRepublic reports:

Most notable is perhaps the French Gendarmerie, the country's police force, which has switched 70,000 PCs to Gendbuntu, a custom version of the Linux-based OS Ubuntu. In the same country 15 French ministries have made the switch to using LibreOffice, as has the Dutch Ministry of Defence, while the Italian Ministry of Defence will switch more than 100,000 desktops from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice by 2020 and 25,000 PCs at hospitals in Copenhagen will move from Office to LibreOffice.

More are coming through all the time. The Municipality of Tirana, the biggest in Albania, has just announced it is moving thousands of desktops to LibreOffice, and nearly 80% of the city of Barcelona's IT investment this year will be in open source.

One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.

Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.

Go to Full Article

Free and Open—and Their Opposites

Doc Searls — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:03:40 +0000

by Doc Searls

A linguistic look at some tenets of Linux.

Merriam-Webster defines a tenet as "a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession." As it happens, Linux is claimed by two doctrines that are to some degree at odds: those of free software and open source. This contention began when Eric S. Raymond published "Goodbye, 'free software'; hello, 'open source'", on February 8, 1998. Here's an excerpt:

Specifically, we have a problem with the term "free software", itself, not the concept. I've become convinced that the term has to go.

The problem with it is twofold. First, it's confusing; the term "free" is very ambiguous (something the Free Software Foundation's propaganda has to wrestle with constantly). Does "free" mean "no money charged?" or does it mean "free to be modified by anyone", or something else?

Second, the term makes a lot of corporate types nervous. While this does not intrinsically bother me in the least, we now have a pragmatic interest in converting these people rather than thumbing our noses at them. There's now a chance we can make serious gains in the mainstream business world without compromising our ideals and commitment to technical excellence—so it's time to reposition. We need a new and better label.

Richard Stallman, father of the free software movement, responded with "Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software", in which he says, "software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom", and that open source allows software that does not value freedom. Which is true in some cases.

But open source, as Eric and friends intended, won the popularity contest. Today "open source" could hardly be a more common expression—or more out of control, serving as a two-word adjective modifying warfare, law, publishing, ecology, government and much more.

Yet free software has not gone away. Its tenets remain the deeper stratum of bedrock on which open-source tenets lie. The Free Software Foundation also remains intact and influential, as do the Free Software Definition and the Gnu General Public License, which Linux has used from the start.

Go to Full Article