Free Software, Free Beer and a Free Lunch

The folks at GPL like to describe the open-source movement as being about providing "free software – free as in free speech, not free as in free beer".

And how should we describe the "free software" that we get from Web 2.0 hosted services? Would that be "free as in free lunch"? Only if you believe in free lunches:

Microsoft has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its free Hotmail email service – the biggest in the world – with information gained from monitoring their searches.

"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come," says Simon Andrews, chief digital strategy officer for WPP Group's MindShare, a large buyer of ad time. Wall Street Journal

And we are not just picking on Microsoft...

Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, said last week that being able to acquire more personal data was a key element in the company's expansion plans. Financial Times

Or pretending to be the smartest guys around: Kerika has a very useful feature called the storage server: it automatically holds project updates for your absent team members. In other words, when your buddies are online, they get their updates directly from you, and when they are offline, these get stored on the server. Pretty cool, huh?

Cool maybe, but not smart enough: we found, during our beta trials last year, that a privacy backlash was already underway, and some people hated the idea that their content would sit on our servers, however briefly – even though we didn't serve up any advertisements, use cookies, or do anything else to track usage and behavior!

So we decided to create your own private networks: a "ring of trust" consisting of just your team's computers so that no one else gets hold of your content. Once you set up your private network, all your messages (project updates, files, etc.) go directly from one team member's computer to another: they don't go through any intermediaries, and if any of your buddies are offline, their messages are stored on your private server.

And what's more, we offer this free to all subscribers, even trial users. On the other hand, if you believe in free beer and free lunches, just sit back and relax, it won't hurt a bit...

We recognize that seeing ads based on the content of an email message can be unsettling at first. Our experience has been that this feeling recedes as users become more familiar with Gmail. Gmail's privacy policy.