Here is good news to all you social media fans especially fans of Flickr, Picasa,DevainArt or even Facebook. Here is a great new project for whom sharing photos and 
artwork online is second nature. Called the GNU Mediagoblin, the project is looking to find solutions that go beyond the copyright policing of most photo sharing service providers of today.
What is GNU Mediagoblin?
GNU Mediagoblin is a WIP (Work in Progress) Project that is looking to overcome issues such as privacy, lack of complete personal ownership of data appearing on these services and of course the innate restrictions on the free use of the software. The services may be free, but for a true-blue open source, the software remains out of bounds and is not as exciting as the GNUMediagoblin is going to be.
GNUMediagoblin is a photosharing idea that does not believe in having a centralized photosharing site with registered users. Most of times, these will have privacy policies that are rather one-sided besides copyright-restrictive use. What Mediagoblin proposes to do is to offer any one to simply post an instance and share the media with friends. This does not require that the same instance is required for viewing.
This is the feature of sharing, is what GNUMedaigoblin is going to deliver. The fact with most of the photos or artwork services is that a private-flagged artwork or photo can be viewed only if the viewer too is registered with their service. On GNU Mediagoblin viewer will not be restricted by such limitations. Viewers will only have to run their own Mediagoblin instance. This will truly overcome seeking permission from third party owned content including artwork.
The ultimate goal on GNU Mediagoblin is to go beyond artwork sharing and photo sharing. The plan is to eventually offer users on multiple servers to share their media without requiring to register and seek access from any third party proprietary service provider.
Identi.ca and StatusNet
This idea of multiple sharing sans a centralized sharing point is already being run on the StatusNet and Identi.ca a Twitter-type service. Identica.ca can continue to be used in chatting-mode while an official or separate instance can be either run by a company on a private instance on StatusNet or hosted by StatusNet as a separate instance.
Gitorious offers the software code on the Free Organization for Software Source format along with Github like code-sharing features.
The license format chosen is the AGPLv3 that requires every change made has to be shared with all of the users. Presently, there is a lot of talk happening across forums on the licensing policy. While some who would rather be passive users of a great and well developed software AGLv3 offers them the perfect gift allowing them to use the full features whereas the developers may feel restricted with having to share code with all the users.
Given the prolific use of StatusNet and Identi.ca within the community there is a lot of optimism about the service becoming successful, overcoming Flickr, and its ilk. Tentative release dates of September/October will depend on quality feedback and contribution by community.
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