Aaron Williamson's webl

Managing your life online isn’t easy.  You use email, IM, and other social tools.  You create, manage, and share documents.  You search for things you’re interested in and research things you’re working on.  You track your finances to the penny and buy everything you need.  You store your private medical records and access information about your health.

To do all of this, you maintain countless passwords, chase your friends across an ever-increasing variety of social networks, and constantly move documents and data between your personal computer and various web services.  But often there’s no good way to get data from here to there — the sites you use may not accept the data format you have or communicate with the other sites holding your data.  Sometimes, the sites you use stop offering the features you need, or are bought by larger companies and shut down to quash competition in a key market.

Google Labs is changing all that with Goolog.  Now, when your life is stored in Google’s services, we keep track of it for you. No more separate identities. No more wondering where all of your friends went. No more moving from place to place.

Take a look at some of the things Goolog takes over for you:

Single point of entry

Remember all of those usernames and passwords you used before?  Now, you don’t have to.  There’s only one way into Goolog: the Google Account login and password you already have!  You won’t need to remember how to log in anywhere else, because you won’t need to go anywhere else.  That’s because, as we like to say at Google Labs…

Everything you do is right here

We already kept your email and your documents for you, and showed you how easy it was to communicate and work with other people in Goolog (though of course we didn’t call it Goolog at the time).  You didn’t have to track your communications and personal documents across folders, hard drives, and websites, because we were tracking them all for you.

Now, we can track everything else too.  You can keep your whole life — the books you read, the things you buy, all your creativity, all the news you get, everything you say, see, and hear, everything you know, your time, your work, your wellbeing, and your money — all right here in Goolog.  What this means is that you don’t ever have to worry about getting it back out again, because all of our services integrate with one another.  Your Health and Finance records are Docs, your Docs move through GMail and Groups, and on to your Sites or your Blog(ger).  Your GMail messages generate Calendar entries and when you Talk we listen, and figure out what you’re trying to do.

Starting to see how much less you need to think about when Goolog is in control?  It gets better.

Goolog is social

Not only is everything you do in Goolog, but everyone you know is here too.  (Ok, maybe not everyone just yet.)  So it’s as easy for you to share everything you do with others as it is to move your data between our services.  And it’s easy for us too!  Now, we can tell the people you know what you’re doing even when you don’t ask us to.

Goolog is exactly what it sounds like

But the social features don’t end there.  The best part of communicating in Goolog is that we hear everything you say, whether you’re emailing, IMing, blogging, or even talking on the phone.  And just like our name implies, we log all of it.

This enables us to make our services more useful to you, because when we keep track of everything you do, we can relate what you’re doing now to what you did months ago, and better understand what you’re trying to do.  It also enables us to make useful data about what people do online available to the public (we anonymize all of the data first, of course).  And finally, it enables us to better serve our partners, by providing them with access to better information about their target markets.

No need to sign up

The best part is that you don’t need to hound your friends for an invite to Goolog. You don’t have to opt in. If you have a Google Account, you’re already in Goolog. So relax… everything you do is right here.

Matt Asay today springs to the defense of the widows and orphans over at Google and their comprehensive prosecution of the Google Chrome trademark. Google sent a DMCA notice to the developer of ChromePlugins.org, demanding he stop using their logos and a remix of their adorable comic, and the developer was understandably upset. Asay’s enthusiasm for Google’s cause is characteristic of his business-first approach to the Business of Open Source (though one wonders if he’s confused Google’s duty to police its trademarks for his own), but his high-handed tone is uncalled-for and his conclusions, though brief, are rife with oversimplification.

Asay responds to a rather balanced account of the enforcement with a volley of fake quotes attributed to god-knows-who: open source means “open to pilfer trademarks” and is “a stick-in-the-eye to ‘The (IP) Man’” and that all related rights are “up for grabs.” He bids the unidentified “some” people espousing these non-quotes, “pay attention… you’re wrong.”

The substance¹ of Asay’s argument is a familiar truism: open source copyright licenses are instruments of copyright law. And as he says, “without copyright there is no copyleft.” But the implication that free and open source software depends upon copyright law (and this must be the implication or there is no point at all) is wrong (and doubly wrong because he italicizes it). Were copyright abolished and the default reset to “no rights reserved,” it would be a trivial matter indeed to allow others to modify my source code — I wouldn’t even need a license, because I would have no right to exclude.  It’s true that under a no-copyright regime, copyleft would break — I couldn’t use my right to exclude to compel others to make available source code they build on top of mine. But copyleft was devised in response to copyright, not in affirmation of it. In the GNU Manifesto which launched GNU and eventually the FSF, rms’s stated goal was to combat the increasing proprietarization of software. If software could not be made proprietary, copyleft may have been unnecessary. Of course, a company could still attain a sort of de facto proprietarization by controlling access to their source, but this would be much less effective under a system that didn’t punish reverse engineering or the use of decompiled or leaked source code.

Maybe abolition of copyright isn’t the answer, but copyright (much less in its present captive state²) is certainly not the only means to software freedom. And the mere existense of exclusive rights, even if similar rights are used to beneficial ends, is no justification for anti-social behavior, whether Google’s or Asay’s.

1. And here more credible claimants to the title “substance,” such as plastic and cocaine, will forgive my lax usage. [↩]
2. My colleague Bradley Kuhn, who has said all of this before, has proposed a regime under which registrants of a copyright in software are required to deposit the entire source and in exchange are given 3 years of exclusive rights to it, after which their code becomes public domain. While not the only solution, or a universally agreeable one, it’s certainly imaginable. [↩]