Network services/Draft statement

The current generation of network services provide significant advantages over traditional locally installed software in ease of deployment, collaboration, and data aggregation. Many users have begun to rely on such services in preference to software provisioned by themselves or their organizations.

March 16th, 2008, a workgroup convened at the FSF to discuss issues of freedom for users, given the rise of network services. We considered a number of issues, among them what impacts these services have on user freedom, how implementers of network services can help or harm their neighbors, and how users can tell which services are friendly to freedom. We believe this will be an ongoing conversation, potentially spanning many years, and our hope is that the FSF will expand its traditional role of moral and technical leadership to include this area.

We consider network services that are Free Software, and which share Free Data, as a good starting-point for ensuring users' freedom. Although we have not yet formally defined what might constitute a 'Free Service', we do have suggestions that users, developers, and deployers should consider when developing, deploying, and choosing software.

• Developers of network service software are encouraged to:
  • use the Affero GPL for their software to ensure that users of services have freedom to examine the source or implement their own instance.
  • develop freely-licensed, user-controlled alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.
  • develop software and architecture that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.
• Deployers of network service software are encouraged to:
  • choose Free Software for your service
  • release customizations to your software under a Free Software license.
  • Make data available to the service's users (not necessarily the general public) under a free data license, such as those approved for Open Knowledge or Free Cultural Works.
• Users should:
  • consider very carefully whether to use software on someone else's computer at all. While we acknowledge that such services may have substantial benefits, they may also create new problems, like locking in users to particular services, or compromising user privacy. Many hosted applications have Free Software equivalents that run on your own desktop or laptop.
  • When deciding whether to use a network service, look for implementers that use Free Software, provide source code, and that make their data available under a free license, so that when necessary you still have the freedom to modify or replicate the service without losing your own data.