by Les Orchard me@lmorchard.com
People access the internet through a growing variety of devices, and many people use many devices. And, largely, those devices coordinate through the cloud.
Firefox as a product tracks this by way of mobile and sync efforts. However, whereas users can run Firefox on hardware and networks they control with relative ease, the growing suite of cloud services are not as easily owned and operated by end-users.
With User Sovereignty in mind, as well as the capability to apply that on a global scale, it doesn't seem like Mozilla has (or should have) the capacity or mission mandate to be the sole "open", "free", or "user-oriented" cloud services provider for the world.
This document, then, proposes a new product: The Hub of Awesome. This product would be an assemblage of essential cloud services needed by core Mozilla products, packaged in a way that empowers end-users to self-host the services as easily as they would install and use Firefox.
That's the goal, at least. It might even be feasible. But, it could use more thought, and a better name.
- Sync
- Notifications
- remoteStorage
- Think unhosted, rather than Dropbox
- Not as much for big documents as for cross-device, non-volatile HTML5 app storage
- Server-side Livemarks
- Bookmarks that maintain long-term relationships with sites and content.
- JSON Activity Streams, RSS feeds, and Atom feeds
- PubSubHubbub and rssCloud
- Need server-side HTML5-based UI for bookmark management?
- Identity
- BrowserID (?)
- Contacts (?)
- WebFinger (?)
- Simple appliance, real or virtual
- Plug-and-play installation
- Minimal, automated maintenance and updates
- Web-based UI
- Server-side "apps" or "add-ons" platform (?)
- Expandability
- Ideally, though, this hub offers enough services to power just about any client-side app.
Basically, anywhere there's an always-on, stationary CPU with net access. This should be a lightweight thing with respect to CPU and memory use. A few gigs of storage are probably required, depending on the base OS and volume of sync data.
- Taskbar or menu resident app for fixed desktop PCs
- Cheap sub-$100 (or sub-$50) plug computer
- Custom router firmware
- Free or inexpensive 3rd party hosting
- VM on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, etal
- Simple signup-and-go services
- Hosted by Mozilla
- Open source software stack
- Minimum server functionality needed to power client-side smarts.
- Especially if the client-side smarts consist of an HTML5 app, which could be served up by the hub but executed client-side.
- Single-URL configuration
- One URL to a doc listing URLs and templates to all available services.
- Would something like Sync's "add a device" PAKE process help?
- REST APIs
- Stay stateless, lightweight, uniform
- Use HATEOS to link to services on different hosts / base URLs
- For personal / private data only
- This is not intended to be a personal webhost, but a personal cloud hub
- Publishing to the public web happens on a scalable, high-availability host like Amazon S3, Rackspace, Dropbox, NearlyFreeSpeech, etal.
- WebFinger maybe an exception, but probably not.
- Use HTTPS, firewalling, tunnelling, etc
- Linux (embedded?)
- Python and/or Node
- NAT traversal
- UPnP?
- Port forwarding?
- Mozilla-hosted PageKite?
- Zero-config?
- Use Rendezvous / ARP / etc to detect on a LAN
- Server can redirect to external URL available through forwarding
- Mozilla Services
- FreedomBox
- DreamPlug
- PogoPlug
- Synology NAS
- Linksys WRT54g