Our Philosophy
Two millennia ago, the world's greatest knowledge base was a network of libraries dedicated to the god Sarapis.
Today, the world's greatest knowledge base is free/libre/open-source (FLO) information on the internet.
We help nonprofits leverage FLO technologies, and in doing so, remind people that the free flow of information is the foundation of civilization.
What’s the Problem?
Technological advancements lead to increases in productivity, which in turn are supposed to lead to increases in wealth. But for the vast majority of Americans, real wealth has actually been decreasing over the last 30 years.
So where is all the new wealth going?
It's going to the large corporations that own the intellectual property (IP) of the technologies we're all using to increase our productivity. Not only are they getting rich off this intellectual property, they're also preventing our society's most important institutions from innovating with it.
Just as an iPhone owner can't add apps to their device without getting Apple's permission, a university can’t alter its student management system without getting permission from whomever owns its software technology This creates inefficiency that results in inflexible bureaucracies and higher prices for critical things like healthcare and education.
It doesn't have to be this way.
What are the Solutions?
We can stop spending huge sums of money on proprietary intellectual property that we'll never own — and instead invest in the development of a global information commons that secures humanity's technological advances for everyone.
We need commonly-owned technology powering every sector of our society — from agriculture to manufacturing, education to governance — and we need it to be "free" (shared without cost), "libre" (used without restriction) and "open source" (source materials aren't concealed in any way).
Fortunately, people have been building commonly-owned technology since the dawn of civilization, so we have a lot to work with. And the idea of FLO information is having a resurgence under a myriad of different names such as “free software,” “software libre,” “open source,” “open knowledge,” “copyleft," “creative commons,” and "peer-to-peer".
Go with the FLO.
The FLO approach has historical roots going back to the ancient Great Library of Alexandria, which brought together the world's largest collection of information from societies and cultures around the Mediterranean, Middle East and India.
(Many scholars think that library was dedicated to Sarapis, but let's save the mythology for another day.)
In modern history, FLO was the philosophy behind the development of the scientific method, which proposes a process through which information can be made accessible to the public.
Today, FLO has transformed the software industry and is beginning to do the same to all the others — but few people are aware of its existence. That shouldn't be surprising. Technology companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Apple spend billions of dollars advertising their products, while widely-used FLO projects like Linux (the world's most popular operative system) and WordPress (the world's most popular website building tools) have virtually no budget for marketing and public relations.
The good news is that important contributions are being made to the global technology commons everyday. Those contributions are accelerating, and they're fueling a productivity revolution that's putting the power of technology back into the hands of the public. We're here to support that revolution.