Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project!

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Good news Everyone! Daniel Grippi announced that Diaspora* will be maintained by the community! Diaspora* was the most promising project for a WWW with open source social networks.

It started about two years ago with 200.000$ in its Kickstarter Campaign, but somewhere on the road, it lost its momentum.

Well, I think this decision will give it again the dynamic to move on and play a key role on the market.

Daniel says:

As a Free Software social project, we have an obligation to take this project further, for the good of the community that revolves around it. Putting the decisions for the project’s future in the hands of the community is one of the highest benefits of any FOSS project, and we’d like to bring this benefit to our users and developers. We still will remain as an important part this community as the founders, but we want to make sure we are including all of the people who care about Diaspora and want to see it succeed well into the future.

Read the complete announcement

Not a Gnome stuff

This is not directly related to Gnome, but these news are quite big to be ignored. I was also a fan of Diaspora and I was doing some programming on it, when it was released. And by the way we are planning to deploy a Diaspora* node by the end of this year and make a Gnome social.

Diaspora* Homepage

Masishta

He himself call it Free Software and not Open Source

alex285

Diaspora is (was) under AGPL and MIT licenses. Besides what’s the reason to play with the words? Free, Open, Libre..

Masishta

Because there is different between Free Software and Open Source.It’s not playing with words.Different words
convey different ideas,different value,different philosophy

alex285

I think that people are more familiar with the open source term, because you cannot call something as free.. Free from what? It seems more like free of charge. For me the “Free” term is totally wrong. But I understand what you mean and I will always include the licenses from now on.

Peter

I do think that the naming is important. When you say “this software is open source” to a user, they will probably think “okay, developers can download the source somewhere, but that does not really affect me”. But when you call it “Free (as in freedom) Software” they can recognize that they (and the society) have added value compared to proprietary software, because they can share the software and ask somebody else than the original developer of the software to adapt it to their needs. It says you have the freedom to do whatever you wish.
The term Free Software therefore transports the ethical value of independence from the proprietor of the software, which “Open Source” does not.
However, when you don’t feel good about using the word “free”, you could also call it “libre” which has the same meaning, but does not lead to misunderstandings.
alex285

“The term Free Software therefore transports the ethical value of independence from the proprietor of the software, which “Open Source” does not.” That goes too deep because you have to actually check the licenses of each program if they have some restrictions. And the problem with that is that they are some custom one’s.

I think that Free Software definition is maintained by FSF only. I am not sure but I think is just a “person’s” definition or a philosophy if you prefer and nothing more. Don’t get mad at it, I don’t know a lot about it :)

I found this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FSF_approved_software_licences), therefore I think using licenses is the correct way.
alex285

Aw an I have a question if you know. Clutter is distributed it under LGPL. That makes Fedora and Gnome non-free software?

ScionicSpectre

I think it would be great to officially adopt Diaspora as an open source social network in GNOME, KDE, and so on, and integrate it into Gwibber and things like that. It’s been pretty good from day one, but it’s improved a lot since I started adding my friends, so it would be a good time to join. I really am surprised that we have such good integration with stuff like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, but developers don’t seem to even care about Diaspora on the open desktop.

Of course, it seems a lot of people on Diaspora are idealists, so it’s kind of a special crowd- not necessarily full of kids who want to play Farmville… yet.