I just released Abacus as Free Software. The source code can be found at GitHub.
This is just a release for the license change.
Also, I'm looking for people who like to provide patches to make Abacus the best calculator for Windows and Linux. Like to help? Send me an email or message me on Twitter.
With Eben Moglen's Freedom Boxes in our minds, I will paraphrase Danny O'Brien, who talked about the Web 2.0 privacy paradox in his Living on the Edge talk.
When you want share a private message with just one person (or some other group of people), you first have to give this message to a Faceless Corporation, which will make sure that only their servers and that other person will see this message.
To which I will add: in the meantime they'll read this message and sell advertising against it to other Faceless Corporations. The architecture of the internet doesn't need the Faceless Corporation, so people can send private messages to each other.
Eben Moglen in Freedom in The Cloud (around 24:50):
The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, "I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time". And it works. Transcript.
The spying can happen, because Facebook (as is much of the internet) isn't decentralized. All information of all (or many) people is collected in one place.
There is no architectual reason for all information to be in the same place. There is no reason for all weblogs or email to be on servers that are controlled by one company.
I host my own weblog. It's not very hard. It's just a web server and some files. It could be easier and much of the rest of the video is about how to accomplish a decentralized version of the services of the internet.
In the past people could leave comments on my weblog. At the moment people can't leave comments anymore.
Still there are people who would like to respond or write about an post that I've written. The best way to respond is to write a post on your own weblog and link to the post that you like to respond to.
If this feels like a lot of work, you're probably right. However it does give you some time to think about your response. It give you a bit of time to write a thoughtful response instead of some small blurp. And you expose your readers to another article about a topic, that you care enough about to write a thoughtful response.