FreeDOM: a New Baseline for the Web Raymond Cheng, Will Scott, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson University of Washington fryscheng,wrs,arvind,
[email protected] ABSTRACT come platforms for further innovation. For example, rather Free web services often face growing pains. In the current than investing in the capital-intensive effort of mapping the client-server access model, the cost of providing a service world, companies like Apple and Foursquare can leverage increases with its popularity. This leads organizations that OpenStreetMap maps, allowing them to focus on their core want to provide services free-of-charge to rely to donations, business. As open source software enables new systems to advertisements, or mergers with larger companies to cope build on existing libraries, free web services can allow new with operational costs. services to leverage community contributions. This paper proposes an alternative architecture for deploy- However, unlike open source software, free web services ing services that allows more web services to be offered for aren’t really free. Wikipedia must raise large amounts of free. We leverage recent developments in web technologies money to support its server operations and bandwidth costs. to combine the portability of the existing web with the user- Some organizations, like Wordpress, freely release the tech- powered scalability of distributed P2P solutions. We show nology for their service, but leave it up to users to handle how this solution addresses issues of user security, data shar- hosting costs. Many developers of free apps are faced with ing, and application distribution. By employing an easily a dilemma: write a popular app and lose a little money, composable communication interface and rich storage per- write a viral app and lose a lot of money.