Live from New York, it's finally Diaspora night! (Sort of.)

No readers like this yet.
open source button on keyboard

Opensource.com

The consumer-ready alpha is still a few weeks away, but today Diaspora released the developer code as promised. Be patient, though--looks like joindiaspora.com is a little slammed. Skip over to GitHub if you want the code.

And even if you're not a developer, you can see the first screenshots. You might notice it looks familiar, if you're not one of the (handful of) people who quit Facebook back in the beginning of the summer.

Diaspora as it is available today includes:

  • Sharing status messages
  • Friending people
  • Uploading photos to albums

All still sounds familiar. They also mention that all traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now). The part that isn't as familiar--the part that gives us openness in our social networking, are the features they list as in progress for the October alpha release. Facebook integration, internationalization, and data portability.

If you download the code now, check it out and let us know what you think.

> Read their status update post

> GitHub for the code

User profile image.
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting.

2 Comments

Diaspora has now published its contributor agreement
http://ur1.ca/1nbrj
which is a joint copyright assignment modeled on that used by Sun. Some who were enthusiastic about Diaspora are now concerned that Diaspora is pursuing an open core business model. I'd expect the consumer-ready alpha to be made available under a proprietary EULA.

Diaspora now appears to be sincerely <a href="http://www.joindiaspora.com/licensing.html">interested</a> in getting community suggestions for how to handle in-bound contributions.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.