                       The Declaration of Software Freedom

                               FreeDevelopers.Net

                                14 February 2001

                       -----------------------------------

      We hold these truths to be self-evident, that    [statue of freedom]
      all men and women are created equal, that they
      are endowed with certain inalienable Rights, and that chief among
      these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

      That to secure these Rights, and in particular the last, Commercial
      Organisations are created to serve the People, deriving their just
      powers from the consent and free choice and will of the People.

      That whenever any Form of Commercial Organisation becomes
      destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or
      to abolish it, and to institute new Forms of Commercial
      Organisation, laying their foundation on such principles and
      organizing their powers in such ways, as to them shall seem most
      likely to secure their personal autonomy and continued happiness.

      Successful Commercial Organisations long established should not be
      changed lightly or for transient reasons; and experience has shown
      that humankind is more likely to suffer, while burdens are
      sufferable, than to right the situation by abolishing the commercial
      forms to which they have grown accustomed.

      But when a long list of abuses persists, pursuing invariably the
      same objective of entrapping people under monopolistic constraint
      and control, it is their right -- it is their duty -- to throw off
      such Commercial Organisations, and to provide new commercial
      principles under which to live, labor and create.

      Such has been the patient sufferance of Software Developers; and
      such is now the necessity to alter their former Forms of Commercial
      Organisation.

      The history of the current Software Commercial Organisations is a
      history of repeated injuries, developer division, subjugation and
      abuse, all having in direct object the establishment of software
      dominion over the people of the world.

      To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

      Current Software Commercial Organizations ...
           hide source code to keep developers divided, disenfranchised
           and dependent; tie inferior products to dominant ones;
           defiantly violate and avoid court orders; quash promising
           competitive start-ups; leverage dominant products into other,
           unrelated businesses; carve up markets to eliminate real
           competition; utilize predatory pricing practices to foreclose
           competition; commoditize and objectify their customers by
           making them captive; cause developers to constantly re-invent
           the wheel by hiding the source code; exercise general thuggish
           behavior in business dealings; compel weak competitors to
           destroy their own innovative products to protect established
           profitable ones; fail to respond to customer requests and needs
           in a timely fashion; exploit natural "choke-holds" in the
           economy for their own advantages; manipulate and delay
           technological progress to maintain supremacy; hide coding bugs
           thereby jeopardizing stability and security; de-humanize
           software developers by considering them as "inputs" or
           "assets"; stifle innovation; "embrace and extend" or otherwise
           pollute open standards in order to break and appropriate them;
           use exclusionary contract provisions to enforce censorship over
           disclosure of bugs and defects; shut-off or block channels of
           distribution to legitimate competitors; announce vaporware to
           foreclose adoption of real competitive products; frustrate,
           taunt and antagonize governmental officials protecting the
           public interest; truncate choices; create confusion and
           frustration in users by selling inferior code; take the
           innovations developed by others as their own; practice
           differential pricing to punish those that oppose them;
           misinform and exploit users; use undocumented features as an
           anti-competitive device; suppress the open, efficient and free
           nature of the scientific method by keeping the code secret;
           purposefully break the code of competitors so that there are
           code inoperabilities across products; prohibit friends from
           sharing software with friends; coerce their users to fore-go
           promising competitive technologies; use overly restrictive and
           exclusionary contracts against weaker competitors; and perform
           other anti-social, anti-competitive and improper acts to
           establish, maintain and extend their software monopolies.

      In every stage over decades of these oppressions, Software
      Developers have resisted in the most imploring terms. But our
      repeated entreaties have been answered only by repeated injuries and
      mounting constraints.

      Executives whose character are thus marked by every act which may be
      defined monopolistic, are unfit, in the age of the Internet, to be
      in charge of software law by which all interconnected digital
      machines will be ruled.

      We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their
      hierarchical structure to extend an unwarranted Monopoly over us and
      the world's citizens. We have reminded them of the fairness and
      freedom of our emigration and settlement upon GPL Software. We have
      appealed to their native reason, justice and magnanimity, and we
      have continually beseeched them to disavow these commercial
      predations with regard to the development of software. But they have
      been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity.

      We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity of dutiful
      opposition, and hold them as Enemies in a Philosophical War
      concerning who shall legitimately govern over digital machines that
      too soon will loom too large over the lives of all People.

      We, therefore, the representatives of Free Software Developers, in
      FreeDevelopers.net assembled, do, in the name of Developers of GPL
      Software everywhere, solemnly publish and declare, that Free
      Software Developers of the world are, and of right ought to be,
      Independent Software Developers; and that all commercial connection
      between them and the projects of Proprietary Software is, and ought
      to be, totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent
      Developers, FreeDevelopers.net has full power to levy Philosophical
      War over the software development paradigm, develop Free and
      Independent GPL Software, contract commercial alliances, establish
      e-commerce and communications, and to do all other acts and things
      which Independent Software Developers may of right do to protect
      themselves and citizens everywhere from software predation and
      monopolization.

      And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each
      other our sacred honor, our faithful minds and daily labor.

      Signed by Tony Goddard of United Kingdom on October 04, 2001 11:42
      AM
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Full list of signatories is available here.

Read an explanation of why we chose to model this document on the
Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson (1776).

See also the proposed company structure for FreeDevelopers, which will allow
developers to be paid for working on Free Software.


Copyright  2001, FreeDevelopers.net
This document may be copied freely, either wholly or in part, provided that
the above copyright notice is included, intact.

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    initial draft HTML generated using LaTeX2HTML,
    edits and CSS by Ross Moore, PHP by Anil Kumar;
    last edited 2001-02-14 (Valentine's Day), for FreeDevelopers.net
    statue of "freedom" by Thomas Crawford
