[Social-mediagoblin] DRAFT 4, press release

[Deborah Nicholson]

GNU MEDIAGOBLIN: FREE AND DECENTRALIZED MEDIA SHARING IN DEVELOPMENT

May 2nd, 2011

GNU MediaGoblin is a new software project that will provide users with
freely licensed and distributed photo sharing. Lead developer Chris
Webber says, "We believe people should be able to own their online
data and that means someone has to build the tools to make it
possible. We decided that someone would be us." For the past two
months, Webber's been laying down technical foundations and assembling
a team of contributors to start building GNU MediaGoblin.

GNU MediaGoblin is being built by free software activists. Chris
Webber and Will Kahn-Greene, both longtime Miro contributors, are
leading the Development Team. Matt Lee and Rob Myers from FooCorp, the
makers of GNU FM (the software that powers Libre.fm) and GNU social,
are providing infrastructure. Deb Nicholson, founder of the Women's
Caucus, is helping with community outreach. As of this announcement,
GNU MediaGoblin is actively welcoming new contributors,
http://mediagoblin.org/join/

"Development couldn't be launching at a better time, given the recent
high-profile failures of so-called cloud services, which have reminded
us of the danger in
relying on faceless corporations to store our cherished possessions
and mediate our personal interactions." says John Sullivan, Executive
Director of the Free Software Foundation. GNU MediaGoblin has the
official support of the GNU Project and will be licensed under the GNU
Affero General Public License and federated using OStatus, making it
compatible with other free network services such as GNU social,
StatusNet and GNU FM.

Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons looks forward to
the launch, "GNU MediaGoblin is free software and has federation
built-in, removing the barriers of proprietary software and closed
networks faced by anyone who wants to offer customers superior media
hosting, to experiment with new features around sharing, curation, and
creation of media, or to simply have full control over their web media
portfolio."

An alpha release of the distributable photo-sharing system is planned
for this fall. Later versions of GNU MediaGoblin will include support
for video and other media as well as tools to encourage user
collaboration on media projects.

Please contact address@hidden with questions about how to
get involved in building GNU MediaGoblin or with questions about
donating.