Like Twitter, but with Freedom Inside

Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2008/07/03/microblog-freedom-inside.html

A company called Control
Yourself, led
by Evan
Prodromou (who serves with me and many others on
the FSF-endorsed
Freedom for Network Services Committee) yesterday launched a site
called
identi.ca. It’s a microblogging
service similar to Twitter, but it is designed to respect the rights
and freedoms of its users.

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I’m personally excited because the software for the system, Laconica, is under the license that I
originally drafted back in 2002, the Affero GPL (which was updated
as part of the GPLv3 process, and is now available as AGPLv3).
This marks the first time I’ve seen a company release its product under
a network service freedom-defending license from the start.

His launch comes at an interesting time. Twitter has had no
Jabber-based updates for more than a month, and Identica allows updates
via Jabber. Thus, in a way, it’s more fully featured than Twitter is
right now!