Freedom matters, not just for software like your Operating System or Firefox, but also for live web-applications. And with more and more functionality and social uses of software moving to the web it will soon only matter more.
About this was my talk at the T-Dose conference of one and a half week ago. I only now come to write about it as my (Wybo’s) father died just 10 days before the conference, and I’ve spent much time with my family since then. And yet even after this unsettling confrontation with the uncertainties of life, freedom for the Web still matters to me.
The presentation first goes into the nature of Web 2.0, and why freedom matters there. Then follows an intermezzo about our project LogiLogi Manta, which is nearing completion. After that it tells about the tendency of many – and especially a certain well known search-engine from Mountain View – to be open at every level except where it would matter most; their own level. Then the distinction is made between 3 planes of freedom for the web; code, data, and community- rights. Two of these 3 levels of freedom go beyond the already much more widely acknowledged importance of Free Software.
So if you have 30 minutes to spare, I would say; have a look at the presentation for yourself. A video is online here in the Ogg-format (If you’re not Dutch you can skip the first 2 minutes of the video, my talk is in English as of that point), and here is a different video in mov-format. A google-video is upcoming ;)
The sheets can be browsed or downloaded as a pdf.
Besides this the conference was great with interesting people like Bas de Lange of Software Freedom Day and Oliver Cleynen of GNU/Linux Matters. Oliver held a talk that is of interest too in the context of Freedom and Freedom for the Web. It can be viewed here
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