"Network services are one of the fastest growing areas in modern software. However, while network services have much of the convenience of free software, only a minority are available under a free license. In fact, it was only last November that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released the GNU Affero General Public License for network services.

Network services are one of the fastest growing areas in modern software. However, while network services have much of the convenience of free software, only a minority are available under a free license. In fact, it was only last November that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) released the GNU Affero General Public License for network services.

Over the last decade, free software developers have been repeatedly tempted by development tools that offer the ability to build free software more efficiently or powerfully.

With every shift from a piece of free software to a web-based network service, we have moved from a situation where a user had control over his or her software to a situation where users have very little control over their software at all.

"The Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on Freedom for Web Services to discuss how the free software community can ensure that software, and its users, stay free in this new technological environment..."

"...Copyleft is not enough. Free software web services must technologically resist needless centralization of services..."

" In the old days, vendor lock-in was on the radar of free software developers. Many systems based on Linux and BSD are used to host internet applications, so many that in fact the server side was considered safe and forces gathered to conquer the desktop.

The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.

"We recently published the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. [...] This isn't a complete solution for bringing freedom to web services. Unfortunately, the current architecture that we use to build network applications is inherently unfriendly to users' freedom. Generally, all the code and data lives on someone else's server, under their control and out of yours. You can never be completely free in such an environment. However, AGPLv3 advances a vision of how freedom works in the computing environment of today and tomorrow..."