By now, everyone has heard about Diaspora, the free software project to create a distributed version of Facebook, and the fact that it has raised $170,000 in just a couple of weeks. But what people might overlook is the innovative way that Diaspora has raised that money - by offering a graded series of scarce goods in return for monetary pledges. Could this be the future of free software funding?

Facebook's latest moves to control the heart of the Web are worrying many people. Luckily, Mozilla has just announced a new Firefox project to manage identity that may be just what we need: a free software alternative to Facebook's plans. Will the next big battle between open and closed be fought between Firefox and Facebook?

After I wrote about the Diaspora project a few weeks ago, I was contacted by Michael Chisari of the Appleseed Project, which is basically the same thing and predates Diaspora by several years.

Diaspora, being a distributed system, is actually a network of multiple instances of the software Diaspora. These instances are called pods. One of the oldest and biggest Diaspora pod, poddery.com is at the verge of closing down. If poddery.com is shut down, it will be a great morale loss to the diaspora culture.

The purpose of open-source and the ideal which it follows is not to let people steal eachother's work, but to improve upon previous designs.

We’ve been going through quite a lot in terms of development over the past month, and with our switch over to a versioning system, stable builds, and a development branch, we would like to take the logical next step in getting Diaspora into the hands of people that want to set up a pod themselves, by helping us make linux distribution packages of Diaspora.

It's probably not true to say that everybody hates Facebook. But there are many millions (of the hundreds of millions that use the site) that claim to hate Facebook's cavalier approach to privacy and founder Mark Zuckerberg's equally vague approach to the future of our privacy. There are even groups dedicated to encouraging users to leave Facebook (some on Facebook itself, ironically).

Project Diaspora is a 2D Space Trading MMORPG for Windows and Linux. Project Diaspora is a High quality, multi-player internet based game. Graphics are good, and game mechanics solid. Create your character or characters, buy a ship, outfit it with weapons, missiles, and equipment. Buy, transport and sell cargo at over a dozen planets in different zones of play.

Last week Wednesday the Diaspora team released the source code for their social networking system to the world. The distributed, open source, so-called Facebook competitor released its code to the public recently but there seems to be some misunderstandings about what the release is all about