[Freedombox-discuss] In-the-cloud infrastructure and business involvement (was: distributed DNS)

[Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson]

Thanks for an excellent reply, Ian.  Comments below.

I forked the threads as I've just derailed it to cover things that aren't
DNS. :-)

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:04 PM, ian at churchkey.org <ian at churchkey.org>wrote:

> On 03/15/2011 09:45 AM, Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson wrote:
> > Again, what problem are you trying to solve?  I am going to assume you
> > aren't being anti-business just for the sake of being anti-business. :-)
>
> I've wondered about running our own dynamic DNS system for a while and I
> think there are legitimate reasons we would want to do that beyond
> general dislike of corporate provided infrastructure.
>
> I tend to think we will have to make use of dynamic DNS for some
> services, like social networking, since we need a way to bridge any
> private addressing capabilities we have between boxes with people in the
> wider world if we are going to successfully deal with existing network
> effects. (More about that here:
> http://churchkey.org/2010/03/17/dynamic-dns-facebook/)
>

I actually think Dynamic DNS will prove grossly insufficient, and you will
need PageKite or something almost exactly like it to actually make most of
those boxes work. ;-)  Which probably makes my motives for pressing this
conversation pretty obvious...


Given that, I'll give two reasons we might want to run our own dynamic
> DNS service(s).
>
[snip, no arguments here]


> Social/Legal reason:
> Given that a core aim of this project is to decentralize infrastructure
> and make personal information harder to access for third parties, where
> we do end up making use of centralized infrastructure, we should make an
> effort to ensure that we have a reason to trust the people running those
> switches.
>
> Personally, I want those people to be 1) people that I know or whose
> position depends on being known by the community, 2) people that I trust
> not to keep logs, and 3) people who have access to good lawyers so they
> don't just roll over when governments start demanding information and so
> they can make intelligent decisions about things like what jurisdiction
> to operate out of and how best to guarantee autonomy through corporate
> structure or community boards or what have you.
>

Excellent points, and all valid well outside the scope of just DNS - they
apply to any sort of "helper" services provided from the cloud, such as SMTP
relays, virtual networks, DNS, proxies, ...

This is something I would love the community to discuss further - you are
well on your way towards drafting a spec here for what a "FreedomBox
compatible" business should look like.

Can that be done at all?  Or should we assume that any infrastructure
required by the FreedomBoxes will be managed and owned and run by the
foundation?  Deciding whether the project as a whole is business hostile or
not is a pretty fundamental question.

Speaking as a free software zealot who optimistically went and founded a
startup in this space, I'm very keenly interested to know how I should
structure my company so it can take part (run infrastructure?  provide
services?) - or, if that is the consensus, interested in being politely told
not to waste my time at as early a date as possible. :-)

-- 
Bjarni R. Einarsson
The Beanstalks Project ehf.

Making personal web-pages fly: http://pagekite.net/
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