How do we achieve practical software freedom in the world of the cloud?

General Discussion
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I wrote a blog about “Software freedom in the Cloud” which I want to share with you: https://www.schiessle.org/articles/2017/11/14/software-freedom-in-the-cloud/

Let me know what you think about this topic.

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Hi @bjoern,

sorry for the drift, but as this is an experiment (and it can be moved to a more appropriate topic)

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I very much agree with your vision. Indeed AGPLv3 is key here, but there are some issues still verifying the source code and the code running in the browser are the same. Even on Operating Systems, reproducible builds are still a work in progress. Promoting good software using AGPLv3 is a great start, ensuring users can verify code integrity follows, but in this regard, attempts at doing it require developer participation: LibreJS for example is not able yet to recognize much code, and will complain that code that is under the GPL may be non-free, pushing the burden on the developers to prove themselves beyond declaring their software free! In this condition, adoption of LibreJS appears seldom possible on a large scale.

Control, people need to stay in control of their data and need to be able to export/import them in order to move.

Of course! But in this domain as well, we lack proper understanding of what is possible and useful. For one, if “your data” is exportable from an instance and importable into another, are you able to keep the links to other people’s contributions that make the real riches of “your data”? Are you able to forward the URIs communicated in the wild via HTTP 301? All these “data” are beyond “your” control, that’s why we need to think beyond data ownership into public digital infrastructure so that data portability is not an issue and who controls the Web is not an issue. What you do on the Web should not be affected by where you do it, but it actually is. Is that fixable? Is that desirable to fix it? All this complexity is not addressed yet.