Summary: A few freedom loving people could get together and set-up a co-operatively owned libre web apps service for their use and enjoyment – probably for a reasonable premium too. Being owned by its users our personal data and information would be secure, and we could do with it what we wish (i.e. transfer out to any other service). Interested? Drop a comment and let’s think about this seriously.
Read on for a more long winded, though not necessarily more carefully thought out, comment on this idea. I hope people find this interesting because I’m sick of using proprietary services like GMail which bombard me with adverts and make no guarantees about the security of my information: I want my freedom back!
It’s seeming more and more like web apps are the way forward; they may not have feature parity with their desktop counterparts yet, but their ability to allow for collaborative work and to get access to your data anywhere is a really big plus. The problem is that all of the popular web apps available today are gratis but not libre (that is, free but not free!). While the problem of exactly what constitutes a libre web app has not yet been satisfactorily answered it might be useful to being to think about a sustainable business model for such a system.
My idea is a timeless one but perhaps has potential in this realm: a co-operative. Speaking entirely for myself, my interest in freedom and the convenience of web apps is strong enough that I would be prepared to pay a small premium for a libre web apps service; assuming there are enough people with similar feelings to myself (I’m sure there are) it would be possible to set-up a co-operatively owned service for a reasonable premium.
The benefits of this are obvious, in my opinion: being co-owned, what happens to our data would be entirely in our own hands – nobody else’s; we could choose the software and interfaces that we like the most; we could promote the development of this software through our use and bug reporting, perhaps along with any excess cash we have.
Furthermore, most of the software we would need already exists as free software: the RoundCube webmail project (or bongo for that matter – which provides calendars too); WordPress’ blogging platform (perhaps); there are web based feed readers which are free software but I can’t remember their names now. What is lacking is any kind of libre web office – although I’m no coder but it seems a lot of the functionality for a word processor already exists in WordPress.
All I’m trying to say in this post is that I think it would be possible to create something cool if we could get a few people together willing to pay a small premium. We could maybe even reduce this if we could convince people with money such as Red Hat, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Trolltech/Nokia to subsidise some of the costs; even without this I think it might be possible.
[Edit: Some random gestomates based on Amazon S3 and EC2 for costs:
- 500 Gb in
- 500 Gb out
- 500 Gb storage
- One large instance + 500 Gb transfer for this
- = $667 per month
- 500 co-operative members
- = $1.30 per member per month.
Even if we halved the number of users, or quartered it, the price still stays under or around $5 per person per month - that's not a lot of money!]