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Image credit: http://trisquel.info

Trisquel is a 100 per cent 'free as in free speech' GNU/Linux distribution started by Rubn Rodrguez Prez nine years ago.

"It started as a project at the university I was studying at. They just wanted a custom distro because... everybody was doing that at the time!" Prez says.

"Since I'm very stubborn, the project kept going," Prez adds.

The idea of software freedom the kind of freedoms Richard Stallman laid out in the GNU Manifesto in 1985 and the original GPL in 1989 are central to Trisquel. (In 2005, when Trisquel 1.0 was launched, GNU founder Stallman was part of the occasion.)

By software freedom "we mean the basic liberties the software user should have: those of using, studying, improving and sharing the software without limitations," Prez says.

"It is a very important issue, because we now use computers for everything: our work, our leisure, our studies; and we should do it under our control. If the government uses software to manage data about the citizens, they should have the code to know for sure how the data is being treated and to guarantee privacy.

"If a school uses a computer for the kids to learn, they should be allowed to study how the tool is made and never get their teacher to answer 'you cannot know that'."

The distro was originally based on Debian's testing repository, but over the course of several years, Trisquel shifted to using Ubuntu as a base.

"The reason was to get a more predictable schedule to work on, and also because we felt that with Ubuntu gaining users it would be good to have a free drop-in replacement to it," Prez says.

Link:
Trisquel GNU/Linux flies the flag for software freedom

When businesses buy software, they don't expect to take what's off the shelf. They get everything customized as they like, open to tweak and update, and with their own privacy and data kept under lock and key.

But in the consumer world of free software, browsers, and apps, you get what you pay for--terms of service are totally dictated by the company. The exception is in open-source alternatives, like WordPress for blogging and Firefox for browsing. There the communities of users and creators have the freedom to control their own domains, and collaborate to improve, customize, and update the product.

Aza Raskin, founding member of Mozilla Labs and creative lead of Firefox 4, is no longer officially part of Mozilla. But he urges the nonprofit to accelerate their strategy of "fast follow"--or cloning popular products, and making the clone open-source.

Take Instagram as an example. Now owned by Facebook, it's already weathered one terms-of-service backlash. Not only would a nonprofit Instagram be easier to trust, says Raskin, but it might be more fun to play with.

"We can make it open and add the ability to analogously view-source. Why not use Javascript to modify, create and share new filters? Or change the layout of your profile? Or clone and host your own version of Instagram that has video? In other words, let both users and developers remix Instagram," he writes.

In doing so Mozilla could become a powerful second-mover in the market. But why stop with Instagram? We should be prying open Mailbox, Gmail, AWS, and many others. By amplifying an existing product and injecting it with our DNA, Mozilla can defend the open web."

(If you like the idea of an open-source Instagram, here are several different versions) to try.)

Online education is one area where remixable, secure, private platforms are both important and are taking hold. As massively open online courses (also known as MOOCs) get more popular, they're starting to be hailed as the solution for cash-strapped public university systems. But there's a high likelihood that the free offerings of venture-funded startups Coursera and Udacity will be subsidized somehow with the use of student data. Luckily, EdX, a nonprofit funded by MIT and Harvard's endowments, offers a widely used MOOC platform that is open-source. They aim to become "the Linux of education."

Fast follow needs to be pretty fast. Once a closed-source platform, like Gmail or Twitter, gets established enough, there are too many costs to switching to even the best-intentioned open web solution. There's also a question of how all of this open stuff will be funded. About 99% of Mozilla's $163 million in revenue comes from search fees from Google, Bing, Amazon and others--in other words, the very for-profits to which they aim to provide an alternative.

But consumers could use more public benefit alternatives--for privacy, for freedom, and for innovation.

See original here:
Where's My Private, Free, Open-Source Personal Web?

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