This document try to describing more our initiative for developers and other technical people.
Some other goals of Kune
- Try to do a decentralized free alternative to privative, centralized, anti-privacy, no cost, web social services. Also many popular social networks have, as only purpose, communication for fun. For fun it’s ok but why not seeing beyong that horizon and use this networks also for open cooperation, for create and share contents and for build collaboratively alternatives?
- Promote open, public and self-managed web social communities.
- Encourage of free (as in freedom) culture and social movements. Let’s create free/libre/open cultural works in collaboration. Knowledge wants to be free.
- Not jet another private web service: Kune is prepared to be installed and used by any organization that wants to provide free web services to social projects of any kind, allowing decentralization of efforts, specialization and localization.
- Towards a distributed “any topic” social forge.
How
- By offering a variety of well know tools like blogs, wikis, galleries, chat, forums all managed in a simple, easy and similar way. FIXME (ver wave)
- Any one can create their web space independent of its technical web knowledge or its resources.
- Users can also have a personal and customizable web space with similar tools and functionality, and use Kune as a personal web page while collaborating in other initiatives, visualizing its involvement and interests FIXME: si así lo desean (es decir que si quieres hacer esta info privada, lo puedas ser).
- Everything with an easily customizable look.
- We are using GWT for better user experience. For instance we have developed emite our xmpp web library and GUI client. Our goal is to use xmpp not only for chats and chat rooms, buddie management or online discuss of contents, as we offer now, but also to build more complex services in the future (like pub/sub xmpp notifications, and collaborative editing). (FIXME, ver la Wave de de Kune – wave para redes sociales)
Some arguments
- If you are user of forges such as Savannah or SourceForge, why not having similar sites for any kind of free content an focused in non-techies for build social, cultural and artistic works? Why not building other commons beyond software, with the same philosophy? FIXME (idem, ver Wave)
- Why to install/maintain/integrate so different web tools (CMSs, mailing lists, …)? Why not to use big and habitable web spaces managed by people without need of web knowledge and with less dependency of us, the techies?
- Why using only one tool per initiative as Wikipedia (only wiki also for discussions) or Blogger (only blogs)? Isn’t it better to use several selectable tools as in software development (mailing lists, SCM, Tasks, Wikis…)?
- Most of the free web CMSs (such as MediaWiki or Mailman) have usability problems to common people.
- If as a developer you still ask yourself: “Why a new development from scratch?” or “Why not just implement X or adapt Y?” or as social activist you think “I prefer to use other well known CMSs for my collectives”, maybe you have to read our FAQ .
Some more characteristics
- Powerful user interface: our workspace, where people intercommunicates and create and share contents, are build with GWT providing a smooth user experience.
- Kune is a free software web infrastructure. It is completely FLOSS and it encourages FLOSS. It follows the GNU/FSF approach to Free Software and uses they AGPLv3 license.
- By default, we recommend using copyleft licenses for group and user contents, and the license are always showed with any content.
- Internationalization: Kune is prepared for being translated to any language, including non-Western languages. Moreover, it has an easy-translation system integrated.
- Modular: In Kune we use our library google-gin, an easy way to develop, keep modularity, and extend our web client adding new functionalities easily. Gin uses the IoC pattern and it’s inspired in Google’s guice, a framework that we use in the server side for the same purpose.
Some technical info
- See the Kune developer’s guide for more detailed development info and links to other relevant developer’s doc.
- Testing: We use intensively JUnit and we are starting to use selenium.
- Code stats: At the moment of write this article, Kune has 879 classes and 20280 lines of code, and emite (our xmpp client) 261 classes and 8991 lines of code. The two projects sums more than 2000 svn commits.
Any help welcome
Kune is in alpha state of development. The development of Client Workspace and Server side are very advanced but the static and significantly less complex public space has been started now. Other tools like Calendar, TODO lists and forums to come.
As Kune is a community-supported initiative, any help, comment and of course patches are very appreciated.
For more info read Join Kune.
