Re: [Social-discuss] Closed software is ahead of us

[Ted Smith]

On Thu, 2010-04-22 at 14:59 +0200, Carlo von Loesch wrote:
> User "Hunger" made some nice clean-up work on
> http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social/Ideas
> and added a link to http://lifesocial.org
> 
> I was quite impressed by the work LifeSocial
> seems to already have implemented. It's pretty
> much the kind of technology Ted and I have
> been talking about: true encrypted peer-to-peer
> social networking.
> 
> Well. So far the good news. Now the bad news.
> I kept looking for the download button over and
> over. Nothing. It's not open source. It has been
> presented at this year's CeBit fair and received
> various reviews in German press but it's undisclosed
> as yet and intending to become a "start-up."
> 
> Okay, we all like making money, but we in the free
> software world will have lost another battle if by
> the time we have a Facebook lookalike solution the
> people are already migrating away to the new "Skype"
> of social networks: A proprietary exe that you load
> to your PC in order to do distributed encrypted
> social applications (and the plug-in interface looks
> quite powerful) but you can never be sure it is
> indeed working for you, not for somebody else, because
> you don't have the source.

My feeling is still that most users have latched onto the idea of doing
social networking as a web site. I don't think they'd really use a
Skypeified Facebook replacement, and the people who want to use a
federated secure social networking system wouldn't use something
non-free.

This is more encouraging than worrying, because it shows that there is
actual interest in what we're trying to build.

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