Re: [gNewSense-users] Re: Freedom and webapps

[Guy Johnston]

Declan Naughton wrote:
> Hello again Crossland!
> 
> On 2/5/07, Dave Crossland <address@hidden> wrote:
>> I am proposing that this is a practical problem, not an ethical one.
>> Please explain the ethical dimension of this.
> 
> Google is of course being unethical in their refusal to release source
> code. We Google users, in a sense, are supporting that. Which would be
> nearly very excusable except for the fact that there are better
> (ethically that is) alternatives which are very much usable. I'm gonna
> be looking out for them as of now. It shouldn't be difficult to get
> rid of Gmail, but I think I'll need to be excused for not finding an
> alternative search engine - although I would HAPPILY support any
> better-ethically efforts to put out a search engine to compete with
> Google - does anybody know of any? I've come across free search engine
> _software_, but usually it's not the software but an interface to an
> index of the web I want. If the developers release the backend code,
> that'd very likely put them ahead ethically, so they can count on my
> support even while I reluctantly use Google to find what I need and
> can't find off them.
> 
> That's how I look at it all.. I would and do well use non-free
> software (at least, in the same way we all do), but very reluctantly.
> 

There seems to be a project on Wikia to create a search engine which
uses free software (http://search.wikia.com). As far as I know, all of
the results pages will also be free content (under the FDL without
invariant sections), as the whole Wikia site is at the moment.