In February, professor Eben Moglen inspired the creation of the Diaspora open source social networking project when in his speech to the Internet Society at NYU, he said:
Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.
And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.
I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.
Last night, it was the turn of Rob Spectre, community evangelist for Boxee, who dropped by the NYLUG in order to grow the community.
Spectre pointed out that while open source technology is widely deployed throughout the internet from the largest core data centers to the newest cell phones, it is absent from the living. This is due largely to the monolith in the living room, as in, “my god, it’s full of patent lawyers!”