Today is the 10th birthday of the Free Software Foundation Europe. If you think back to what software looked like ten years ago, in 2001, things were a lot different than they are now. There was no hosted software. The term ‘Software-as-a-Service’ was only 2 months old when FSFE was founded. At the time, the big battles were (if I remember correctly), Linux against Windows, Firefox (then still called Mozilla) against Internet Explorer, and LibreOffice (then still called OpenOffice) against Microsoft Office. Google docs, gmail, youtube, facebook and twitter did not exist yet. Even though the internet was already ubiquitous, and the web had existed for a few years as a web of information, software was still something you installed, either on your desktop computer, or on a server.
Ten years later, most newly published software is now hosted as web apps - possibly with native clients to improve the experience on smart phones. Google is even releasing a laptop that has nothing but a browser on it. And unlike the installed software we used ten years ago, hosted software is never free software, with wikipedia as an all-too-lonely exception. As software has moved from installed to hosted, the running costs that come with hosted software have pushed free software out of the playing field. Even though the struggle for software freedom on the desktop and on the server continues, there is a very important struggle ahead of us, for bringing software freedom to the web.
The reason I started the Unhosted project last September, was the lack of software freedom on the web. Now that the unhosted web exists, I can look back and see that we more or less achieved two improvements over web 2.0, that may help us to increase software freedom on the web. First, the domain hosting an unhosted web app only hosts source code, and no dynamic data or processes. This reduces the running costs to a fraction of what they were. So on the unhosted web it’s more feasible to publish web apps as public domain software.
And second, since the unhosted project decentralizes processing to each user’s browser, it makes it more feasible for each person to patch and fork a web app, and run a different revision of it in their own browser than other people. You have to take care to keep compatibility, but at least the user has control over it. If you run all processes on one centralized server farm, you probably run just one version of the web app on there.
When I published version 0.1 of Unhosted, back in December, I was quite satisfied with these two achievements, and announced that there would be software freedom on the unhosted web. I was wrong about that, though.
In a personal email discussion, Richard Stallman pointed out to me why Unhosted is not good enough. Because if you visit an unhosted web app in the browser, you always receive the same version of it. You can only change the application’s source code if you make a copy of it, and run that copy instead of the original version. If we want software freedom to exist on the web, we need to make the process of fetching a web app from the server to the browser more controllable.
One option would be what I call “gitnode”: the combination of git and node.js. This would basically be one server that acts as a git instance and a node.js instance at the same time, depending on through which interface and protocol you approach it. The essential part here is that the documents are the same, whether you run them as node.js programs, or clone them as git repositories.
Another option for this would be to use a platform that already combines the repository server and the application server into one: CouchApp. If you happen to know that an application you’re viewing is a CouchApp, and you run CouchDB locally, then you can tell your local instance to replicate it, and view the app locally. You can then alter the application on your local CouchDB instance, so you have achieved software freedom. Right now, this is already possible, but it’s about 5 clicks. You need to go to the admin interface of your local couch instance, select replicate, click OK, etcetera.
My idea to improve this would be to create a special, recognizable button that people can integrate into their CouchApp, and that does all of this in one click. It tries to detect if you have couch running on the standard port on localhost, and if not, it offers to download CouchDB and install it first. If CouchDB is already installed, then you can skip this step. The next step would be opening up a special ‘allow’ dialogue, served by your local CouchDB server’s admin interface, where you authorize the installation of the couch app. After this, you’re automatically redirected to the app, on your local couch instance.
The button could be a special, recognizable ‘View From Your Couch’ button. Especially if CouchDB were an integrated part of the browser, this would truely change the way we consume web applications, and it would bring software freedom back into the game.