46 7. BUILDING FOR FREEDOM: OPEN DATA, OPEN SOURCE
email, people read their email over the Web. Similarly, discussion groups, chat rooms, and other forms of social interaction have moved inside the Web browser.
But software developers quickly discovered that, for social creatures like us humans, everything has a component of social interaction. For example, titling and categorizing the photos you take would seem like an obviously solitary activity. But sites like Flickr demonstrate that people love to discuss and categorize photos of their friends, or even strangers, and that people, all things considered, would prefer to organize their photos in a program that exposes them to other people.
The result is the recent “Web 2.0” phenomenon, in which just about every piece of computing is moved onto the Web and made social in some way. For photos and videos, there is Flickr and YouTube. For news, there are sites like Digg and Reddit where you can submit, edit, and vote on news stories. Calendars, todo lists, even music collections and word processors are all being made into dynamic social web applications.
Pundits now discuss a not-too-distant future of “dumb clients” and “cloud computing” where the other applications on the computer disappear and all that is left is the web browser. And for people who use kiosk computers or Internet cafes, that future is already here.
For some, this is an exciting prospect. But for those, like Stallman, concerned with issues of software freedom, it is frightening. Even in the dark days of the proprietary printer driver, Stallman still had control over the computer which drove the printer, even if he did not have the source code to modify it. But with a Web 2.0 application, you don’t have even that. The computer running your software is locked away in some distant server farm. You can only communicate with it through your web browser.
Now this does provide some flexibility. Web browsers can be programmed to block ads or extract content. Plugins like Zotero and Greasemonkey let users add new functionality to existing sites by intercepting and modifying documents as they come back from the Web server.
But this is a rather pale notion of freedom, like saying that moviegoers have control over the films they watch because they can hold pictures up in front of the screen as they watch.
Another option, of course, is providing APIs. Thus, instead of having to manually click the “buy” button on an Amazon page to buy a new set of razors, with an Amazon API you can have a program automatically purchase the razors for you every month.
