Re: [Social-discuss] Future of GNU social

[Ted Smith]

On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 18:51 +0100, Rob Myers wrote:
> On 05/28/2010 05:11 PM, Ted Smith wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-05-28 at 11:51 -0400, Matt Lee wrote:
> >> Due to maturity of the codebase, myself and the other contributors have
> >> decided to build GNU social alongside StatusNet, and additionally, we
> >> recommend OStatus as the basis for the distributed social networking
> >> protocol we intend to champion.
> >
> > I thought this had been discussed (and rejected) in the past - as far
> > back as the autonomo.us mailing list. What's changed since then in terms
> > of the StatusNet protocol serving as the basis for the GNU Social
> > protocol?
> 
> No other protocol has the same mixture of maturity (as you point out), 
> large existing deployment base, and FSF-assigned code.

The FSF assignment was announced yesterday (IIRC); did you have
knowledge of it sooner?

I find the general air of secrecy around this sort of disconcerting. I'm
asking these questions because I want to know how the decision was made
so that I can follow the logic and hopefully arrive at the same
conclusion. These are all very good reasons, but it seems like something
is missing.

Personally, I don't like this choice. It forces the implementation
paradigm in the direction of "web servers", which is a step backwards
for user freedom. If it were possible to implement OStatus in a p2p
network, I would be less negative, but as I've been reading over the
spec it seems that that's impossible. Someone more familiar with OStatus
should definitely correct me if I'm wrong - I would love to be wrong
here.

> > Personally, it is still my opinion that a higher-level protocol,
> > speaking in terms of abstract concepts, and implemented over several
> > other protocols, including OStatus and everything else, as transports,
> > would be best for this GNU World we're building, and I don't understand
> > why OStatus alone is being singled out now. The StatusNet codebase has
> > been mature as long as this project has been alive.
> 
> OStatus is being singled out now because it has become possible to do so 
> and because it has momentum from the great work StatusNet have done.

What do you mean by "it has become possible to do so?" Were you waiting
on the copyright assignment to the FSF?

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part