Why?

1 Goals

In general, The Peers Community has several long term goals:

• Funding. Peers originally had planned to start as a fundraising service for priority and member projects. Not too long before Peers started, Snowdrift.coop had already begun crowdfunding market research on a free/libre service.

• Prioritization. We plan to follow the example of the FSF which has their own list of high priority projects. Peers has a list of project ideas, though at this time cannot offer bounties in general.

• Reducing Compromise. Not everyone leaves proprietary software in a single bound, in fact it might take a long time to achieve. Watch or listen to a roundtable discussion on the need (or lack of need) for compromise in Free Software. Hosted by Bryan Lunduke with panelists including: Richard M Stallman, Aaron Seigo, Swapnil Bhartiya, and Stuart Langridge.

2 Projects

For specific tasks, please visit the issue trackers for each respective Peers project.

3 Reasons

We have many reasons, in general, why to use free software and to use decentralized, private/anonymous services, instead of proprietary software or services.

Ethical reason: we all benefit by sharing knowledge.

Personal reason: with free software, our computers do what we want them to do! On the other hand, with proprietary software computers are controlled by other people.

Economic reason: users lock-in. Switching away from proprietary software can require significant time or financial costs.

Convenience: forced to do what a company thinks best (for example you must use their software or files type).

Privacy: you become constantly watched by somebody who can do pretty much whatever they want with your personal data, because you've "agreed" with the "license agreement" that they can. This is by very far the most serious argument that people seem not to understand, because they always say "so what? What I'm doing with their service is of little value anyway!".

4 Testimonials and Examples

We searched the web for Non-Peers Community people who had shared their own experiences and expertise.

• Peter Swire testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on encryption and the balance between public safety and privacy.
• Drew DeVault explains why we should use IRC instead of slack.
• Alberto of flosspirit went one year without Whatsapp (en español).
• Whatsapp blocks users from Telegram from communicating with each other.
• The FSF promotes free software awareness in their video User Liberation.
• Robin Doherty explains Why privacy is important, and having "nothing to hide" is irrelevant.
• Erik Möller discusses licensing in The case for Free use: reasons not to use a Creative Commons - NC license.
• Dr. Tarek Loubani speaks out how free software and hardware become essential to sovereignty among developing nations, and how we can use them to secure infrastructure and information against sophisticated adversaries.
• Actor, comedian, and technologist Stephen Fry summaries the early history of GNU and Linux and the pragmatic reasons for using free software.
• Minifree maintains their own list of how and why proprietary payment services restrict user freedoms.

5 Recommendations

As an alternative to some proprietary communications, and gaming platforms, we recommend the following.

5.1 Software

For catalogues maintained by other organizations for free software:

• The Free Software Directory for software in general
• FSF PRISM Collection for secure and private computing
• GNU free distros for choosing a free system
• Libregamewiki a wiki for games by Han Dao. All documentation under dual GNU FDLv1.2 and CC-BY 3.0. Powered by MediaWiki.
• PRISM Break maintains a website to protect users from insecure internet usage, specifically related to privacy, citing only free software and with all website licensed under the GPL¹.

5.2 Hardware

• FSF Respects Your Freedom Certification
• FreedomBox list of free hardware

5.3 Highlighted Projects

6 Footnotes