At the risk of sounding like RMS (ie Richard Stallman who believe in complete software freedom) I am becoming concerned that the Web is becoming "free as in beer" rather than "free as in freedom" (the word Libre is often used to capture the second meaning).
We pour our digital lives in Google apps, Facebook, Twitter, etc, but where is our data, what is it being used for and what happens when they stop providing the service ? I went to add someone's birthday into my Android phone which is synced to GMail and I thought how birth dates are often used as identification confirmation questions over the phone and about recent hacker activities where user information has been dumped to globally accessible site. I decided not to put the birth date in but realised that many of this person's family and friends may already have done so (and my own birthday is probably on various servers as well despite anything I might do). I don't use Facebook but all my emails and contacts and calendar entries are on Google servers so they probably have a lot of information on me should they choose to use it. I am becoming more and more dependent on the services too but what would happen if there was a huge hack or legal issue and the servers were shut down. I have no protection or control but at least it is free (as in beer).
So what is the answer ? Well I would like to see the web services I use to have Open Source code, be able to run on servers I nominate and store data where I want it and encrypted in a way that keeps my data safe. Like Linux, this ensures I have control over applications and data and the code is there for anyone to fix, extend and modify so the overall ecosystem grows. We can also see how the data is being used and be vigilant for backdoors etc.
For this to work I think we need to pay for use of the hardware that is providing the service. I am thinking of something like Amazon but dedicated to running Libre Web services. You would pay a fair price for what you use but it could be kept quite low. It should even be possible for user's PC to do computation on behalf of the cloud and get paid for it. You could set up your own dedicated Web Services or use shared ones which had well documented version numbers, references to source code and administrators who were trusted and accountable.
Another important component would be having the data kept separate from the Web Service. We would need a standard Data Service API for the Web Service to use such that the user could configure which Data Server (or even multiple Data servers) stored the user's data which of course would be encrypted. The user could then even arrange to backup the Data Server data to their own PC (an interesting reversal). The user can thus protect themselves from data loss and data misuse.
Another component that could do with improvement is digital payment (I have ideas about this too - so there is probably another blog post coming). If it was easy, safe and accessible to everyone (eg those without credit cards) to pay for computer based services then people would do it a lot more readily.
With these components we would start seeing free (as in freedom) Web Services and Data Services pop up, with associated source code, to be used by people who value the benefit of services that run on the web but also their freedom and don't mind paying for the hardware that runs it.
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