AGPLMail
Free software is a good thing, its empowering, I might even go as far as to say its the way things should be done. One of the biggest threats to free software at the moment is “web services”, or if you’re an airy fairy Web 2.0 person “The Cloud” (airy could, geddit?). The reason its such of a threat is because not only most open source advocates, but also a lot of free software fans are using these propretiary, remotely hosted applications. Including me.
Now, I personally think web services are a useful thing, especially since most people end up using multiple computers. But, the critical requirement for web services that respect the users freedom is that the user can take their data and run the software, in freedom, on their own server. If they can’t do this, they are locked into one vendor who may go bust at any time, this isn’t right. (A great example of doing-it-right™ is wordpress, I was able to migrate this blog, onto my own server, using free software, with great ease.)
So, a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my amazing code genius moments, and I decided to write a free software replacement for GMail. I did this because no-one else seems to be addressing this issue (except maybe the Bongo Project, but they’ve decided to rewrite the entire web front-end, so it doesn’t seem very ready at the moment).
Anyway, I know have a working (but rather hackish) email client written in php that supports conversations and archiving, which I have called AGPLMail. The name is due to the the fact its released under the AGPL (bet you’d never have guessed). For those not in the know, this is an FSF license, like GPL, but which extends the provision about users right to source code to include programs accessed over the network. This means someone can’t take my code, change it, offer it as a service, and then not contribute this. My application actually prints its own source code.
Now, the problem with my “code genius” moments, is that over about a week I write several hundred lines of codes, and then get distracted by something else, and leave it half finished. This is the fate that greeted Freedometer, something I don’t think I’ve even blogged about.
And that, is I guess the point of me writing this, I have written this code, which works and is useful, but I don’t want to be the only person involved. So, please tell me, am I doing something valuable? Is my code/overall design good or completely crap? Does anyone else want to use it (this we be a cool honour for me). Most importantly, would anyone be willing to help me develop it.
If anyone is interested, I have created the project a git repo [1], and my own copy can be found here. There is a demo account (username: demo; password: password), if anyone is interested in having a play. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Whether anyone else jumps onboard will make a big difference to wether AGPLMail becomes a succesful project, or just another of my abondoned projects.
[1] Noww, time to open a real can of worms. I’m hosting this project on github, which does not provide the source to there interface. However, as a git host, the data is inherentley get-at-able, and more importantly decentralised. The important thing and the reason that I don’t see github as a problem is the escapist principle. I don’t need github, if it were to go down suddenly, I’d still have my own personal repositories (which have exactly cthe same info as the github one) and could point people to them instead.