Wow, Melvin, that discussion is wide ranging - everything from protocols, to web based applications, desktop applications to semantic technologies. My quick read of the different threads did not point out any sort of consenus being reached concerning what is GNU Social. The wiki page on FSF said that it is going to be a social networking application that users can deploy like Wordpress but the discussion in the listserv mentions a lot more possibilties.

Thanks Melvin for this...it's very interesting.  What I gathered was this is pretty early on in the discussion for GNU Social.  I went ahead and gave a bit of feedback that I hope helps.

Hi Guys

Many thanks for the feedback!

I think we're coming to a consensus, and I think starting with building off the elgg 1.7 codebase and plugin structure has strong merits.  However, the final scope of the project is aimed to be more far ranging, branching out to other systems, protocols and devices.

Hopefully, we'll also be able to get the support of the W3C on this, too, especially when the W3C Social Web Incubator Group (Matt Lee and I are members) makes its final report in September.  FSF and W3C are both based on Boston.

I look forward to continued discussion!

It looks like the project lead wants no third party frameworks: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/social-discuss/2010-03/msg00012.html

I also see this in the discussion: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/social-discuss/2010-03/msg00118.html

In addition, there's this page: http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Group:GNU_Social.  Especially:

Why not use existing free software social networking code? We want to be able to ensure that the FSF (the copyright holder) can make the right decisions to protect this code for years to come. If you're interested in assigning copyright on your existing code, under the AGPLv3 (and later versions), please do get in touch.

AGPL licence will be a must for GNU Social

But I think it may be possible to keep the core the same, and work on some plugins

Matt Lee asked me to set up a test install at

http://gnusocial.me/

I'd like to fix up the FOAF and send you guys a patch

Melvin - a patch for FOAF would be great! 

The Elgg svn nightlies for the 1.7 branch are here: http://elgg.org/download/nightly/1.7/

SVN info here: http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Development/Subversion

Trac here: http://trac.elgg.org/

No one has touched the FOAF views for a while so you should be safe creating a patch against 1.7. What is in the latest nightly is very close to what 1.7.1 will be (or at least that is what I expect).

Oh, and on licensing - the core is dual licensed (GPL2 and MIT) while the plugins (most of the plugins?) are GPL2 only.

@Cash many thanks for the pointers, I'll familiarize myself with the links, and start putting together some code for you guys.  I've bookmarked the IRC too.

I'll keep this thread updated with any developments on the GNU front, perhaps they'll jump on board at the 1.7 or 1.8 stages, but it's all good, I think everyone is working in the same direction and hopefully collaboration will increase over time!