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Purpose

Explain where the design concepts come from.

Content

The Concepts section mentions four concepts:

• Decentralization
• Distribution
• Peer-to-peer
• Federation

These concepts lie at the heart of the architectures suggested in this wiki, and in many other systems. Before explaining and planning further, I’d like to explain the rationale.

The following values are extremely important to me:

• Freedom of speech
• Right to privacy
• Sharing
• Cooperation

What it means:

• Freedom of speech: Say what you think without fearing, including things against the government, without being in danger and without being censored

• Right to privacy: Be able to choose that certain information is private and nobody else should see it, and have the wish granted, i.e. nobody will see it even if sent to other computers, and nobody will use it for any use other than what you planned

• Sharing: After creating something, you share it for the benefit of your local community and mankind

• Cooperation: When two people/groups have the same need, they work towards finding a solution together

Why are these values important? Because without them:

• Competition promotes selfishness and greed
• Censorship mutes people’s voices and their ability to affect the world they want to live in and leave for next generations
• Without privacy, there is no personal space and our personal information is accessible to others
• Lack of sharing creates loneliness and promotes individualism and hate
• Human progress is hindered for no equivalent benefit, great minds are wasted inventing anti-features like DRM
• Individualism and capitalism cause a situation of increasing poverty and of growing excess in the same place

This is a very sad world, and I refuse to rest as long as there is something I can do to make it a bit better for this generations and for the next generations. This is where the 4 concepts come from:

• Freedom of speech: use encryption and distributed protocols in order to make censorship as difficult as possible
• Privacy: use encryption, decentralization and distribution in order to avoid disclosing user data to third parties, both on the individual level and on the mass level
• Sharing: use copyleft licenses and distributed peer-to-peer networking to run resilient independent content sharing
• Cooperation: use copyleft licenses, decentralized tools and define “benefit and rights of mankind” as the goal, and nothing else

As you can see, I added new ideas not mentioned above. Therefore here is an updated list:

• Decentralization
• Distribution
• Peer-to-peer
• Federation
• Copyleft
• Software freedom
• Encryption
• Morality, values, human rights

Finally, here is an explanation of what they are:

• Decentralization: Run an unlimited number of servers, rather than one single centralized access point
• Distribution: Spread data in the network directly between nodes, and not rely on central services
• Peer-to-peer: Machines communicate directly, removing services handling connections in the middle
• Federation: Make separate services work together and allow connections from one to the other
• Copyleft: Publish work allowing free copying, adaptations and redistribution, but the same conditions must be applied when redistributing
• Software freedom: The four freedoms described by Richard Stallman and the FSF
• Encryption: Encoding data at one edge of the connection, and decoding on the other edge, so in the middle it’s impossible to read
• Morality, values, human rights: The universal feeling of what’s right, which I wish we all found in our hearts