Creators of free and open source software are often criticised for not bothering to make equivalents of proprietary software and web applications to attract users over.

This criticism is frequently levelled at the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project which kicked off the process of creating a free operating system back in the 1980s. Such criticism is often driven by ideological considerations and out of ignorance.

Social networks are all the rage today and with that in mind, the FSF is driving the creation of social networking software which should provide similar functionality to Facebook with two important differences — privacy and freedom are in the user's hands.