Greetings,
Today marks a remarkable transition in the history of the NiteCo project!
After approximately 18 month (since this project was launched on Jan 2th 2009) of a closed source development by a one-man-army (myself) , i've finally decided to lead NiteCo to the world of free open source.
All software powering this project , shall be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
under such terms you're free to copy , distribute and use this system for any purpose and you may adapt the system under the conditions that any future adaptation or derivative is to be published under the exact same terms and making reference to the original system , while preserving the project's title "NiteCo" and list of authors (starting with the founder) who contributed to it.
the reason behind this move , is to promote freedom and democracy by putting knowledge and control into the hands of the public , as well as counter the increasing dominance of privately owned corporations over the internet and the computer world at large (i.e google inc , facebook inc , youtube (subsidiary of google inc) , windows live/hotmail/msn (owned by microsoft corporation) , twitter inc , yahoo inc and the chinese baidu inc ..etc)
that said, the purpose of NiteCo is NOT confrontation but to drive innovation forward and to be a guardian of free speech and open technological standards , therefore fostering an environment that is inhibitory of monopolies and vendor lock-ins .
it will be a guardian that is unswayed by financial gain or political agenda , in other words the purpose of NiteCo is to Make a Difference!
a compelling vision of the future , would be to have a universal social network whose content and control is distributed over many individual nodes yet still connected togther , allowing a free exchange of feeds , videos , data , articles and so forth...
imagine yourself creating a personal profile and establishing various types of relationships to other users like yourself , in the form of friendships or subscriptions then move to a completely different website , yet still be able to login using the exact same credentials , basically having a universal secure online identity that retains all your profile information , including your friendships and subscriptions!
but it gets even better , within the context of such a decentralized network there will be no place for a central authority that could shut you down or censor your opinions or deny your human rights to free speech , under the auspices of violating some obscure terms of service or because a certain individual or faction decided that your thoughts are a taboo subject.
at the same time , you shall be protected from potentially abusive users such as spammers by allowing you to control the type , quantity and the manner in which information is passed on to you.
at the same time , you shall precisely decide what information other users can learn about you , therefore putting your privacy into your own hands , you may choose between being fully accessible to anybody to being totally invisible to others ...or any state in between , it shall be all up to !
however , the mission of NiteCo shall not stop were contemporary social networks end but may eventually venture further and become embedded almost into real life , for instance the prospect of executing financial transactions within a web of trust model , could (at least in theory) become reality.
how about building massive multiplayer online games on top of the foundation of this network?
and could it be possible to introduce the third dimension into the system , making it truly virtual?
the bottom line is , the limit is only your imagination !
At the moment and for security reasons , the software will only be available to interested developers on a request basis.
if i managed to stimulate your interest and you have the necessary knowledge and time then i'd welcome you on board the development team of this project.
Please send me a private message (preferred) or leave a comment below containing your email , after that you'll receive the information necessary to obtain the project source.
Kind Regards
NiteCo Founder
Fares Kallaji
