FreedomHosting

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Freedom Hosting is about hosting freedom by dynamically allocating ownership to the users of physical Sources of Production.

Reasoning

Information, whether DNA (organism genetics), wiki software, MMORPG software, photographs or video, email, or any virtual material requires physical mass and energy to store and express it. Information is not infinite only because it is permanently anchored to the physical world.

When you raise another organism instance (to provide food, medicine, fiber or building materials) you will need land, water, sun, food (fresh for fauna, rotting for flora or fungi), and probably some tools, and maybe some shelter.

When you copy a program, the new copy must be stored on Optical, Magnetic or 'Flash' media. Even if the program is so small that you can just memorize it, and type it in at another terminal, it still must reside in your grey matter until transferred to the RAM and then hard-drive of the machine you work at. And that program will be of no use unless it can be expressed by a somewhat expensive computer that requires constant electricity.

Hosting can be fairly easy for a individual, but the complexity of joint ownership required to establish a community makes it clear that the owners of the physical Sources are in control, and those owners very well may not be the Users, especially as the community grows.

If this is not clear, then why do we continue to wish/beg/wonder about the big fish eating the smaller fish in the rapid aquisitions of community portals now occurring? If WE (the Users) could have real ownership in a community, then the decision to sell would not be so arbitrary since no one person (or small group) could make such a decision - for they would not own more than their fair share.

But, then, how do we determine what is 'fair'?...

Design

RichardStallman and EbenMoglen? speak of "User Freedom", never mentioning Worker or Owner freedom.

But they are speaking of the virtual part of software while mostly ignoring the real costs of hosting. Physical Sources are much more difficult to share because of their rivalrous and finite nature.

But if we follow the pattern of the most successful license - the GNU GeneralPublicLicense - we may at least find a pattern to follow.

The GPL is a TradeAgreement? between owners software INSTANCES (owners of the physical media required to store that software). It puts not restrictions on USE; it only comes into effect when an instance owner shares (trades) that exact copy by allowing someone to use the media it is burned onto, or (more likely), by allowing the new User to create a copy onto some other physical medium.

When such trading occurs, the requirement is that the new User be given "at cost" access to the Sources of that information. Again, this is fairly trivial when only speaking of the virtual part of information, but what can we do when we want the User to gain control of the Physical Sources?

One way is a RevenueSharing? proposal that causes any Price paid above Cost (what would usually be called Profit) to become an investment in the Physical Sources required to insure that information continues to be hosted in the future under the direct but collective control (limited by the agreement of the owners of each realistically divisible sub-group) of that very same User. In this way hosting can be both large-scale *and* under consumer (user) control.

Implementation

Here is a rough idea of such a proposal.

Freedom Hosting Owner Agreement

As an owner you may:

: 0. USE your portion for any purpose. {data should be encrypted by default for everyone's safety}
: 1. MODIFY your divisible portion to suit your needs, and indivisible portions according to your vote weight - which is exactly your ownership % for that larger divisible part.
: 2. COPY your portion by gaining access to more physical sources.
: 3. SHARE (trade) your portion, whether MODIFIED or not.

If you SHARE or trade your portion (whether MODIFIED or not) you must:

: A. Attach this DEED to each instance.
: B. Invest all profit as user shares in physical sources.
: C. Issue GNUrho currency against those investments.

This is only meaningful for joint ownership, as profit is separated from wages as workers are hired by owners.