Free-as-in-freedom replacements for many services do exist. By and large nobody knows about them, perhaps because the community isn't unified on the issue like it was against Microsoft, as you point out. I'm not sure privately working toward cloning services is a good way out of this situation. :)
autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it.
You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.
Thanks for the link, will check it out. GNOME was the first environment I used that had cohesive e.g. system preferences across the environment, and later a consistent update process (if I remember it right, Ximian were the first to include an updater in GNOME).
Half the battle isn't producing the software, it's ticking all the boxes that make people "go cloud" in the first place – you never need to run software update for Google Docs, you simply don't need to care about it.
What I'd love to see is a Ximian-styled system where you could subscribe to some release cycle (bleeding edge, 6 months behind, long term support), and behind the scenes a vast team of idealist monkeys worked to provide some of that cloud comfort – at the very lest, security updates.
The concept can be extended to quite elaborate proportions. But the low hanging fruit - let an admin create user accounts, let users login painlessly, and figure out how to make updates work safely & painlessly - and I believe half the war would already be won.
autonomo.us is one mostly silent place to talk about it.
You may be right that there needs to be a (I think you might mean GNU project, not GNOME foundation?), but for the web. My guess as to why there hasn't been one is that the task is far messier, and there are a lot more choices about implementation. The usual thought following this is that free services need to federate rather than be part of the same project. But this thought could be wrong.