There is hope¶

The more our everyday life depends on computers, the more it is important to ask who controls these computers: who decides where to store information, when to upgrade the software, which features to drop and which ones to develop, how to implement security controls, and how to distribute the costs.

Many important parts of our IT infrastructure depends on the good will of a few deciders who live in a single country. And history shows that every country can potentially turn into a rogue state.

In The Internet is Shrinking, Joan Westenberg describes how the internet is increasingly being abused by technology giants to trap us in digital zoos. Digital sovereignty was unfortunately just technical jargon for many decision-makers until 2025, but meanwhile even the smaller city councils started to talk about it.

Fortunately, there are groups who lead meaningful public education work, such as the FSFE (“We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.”) or the OSB (“Germany’s digital sovereignty and the innovative power of our economy depend crucially on how quickly and decisively public administrations can break free from their dependence on proprietary software.”)

There are stories, however, of organizations or governments who, thanks to a few idealists, made a step toward software freedom and then had to back down. The idealists were blamed for the “misstep” and people concluded that free software was “unusable”.

Free software is written by people who love their work. But software development is much more than writing code. Designing, optimizing, testing and selling software are boring tasks compared to writing code. Big corporations even pay top-level academics who observe end users behaviour in order to optimize the user interface, or who train programmers in order to optimize their efficiency, or who talk to politicians in order to change some law.

We start to realize that free software needs a supporting institution to function sustainably. In Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech, Bert Hubert explains that “Linux” doesn’t have a chance against “Microsoft” because the comparison itself is like comparing apples and oranges.

Yes, the problem with free software is that there is no organization that cares for it. This problem is not the problem of free software, it is our problem. Our problem is that we still use proprietary software at all. Proprietary software is governed by a legal person whose sole purpose is to maximize the profit of their owners. The fact that proprietary software is more user-friendly is just a side-effect of their purpose. This is a catastrophic situation because owning the source code means owning the power.

It’s true that money is the only real argument because humans need to satisfy their basic needs. We won’t get hobby software projects working as user-friendly as professional products as long as the money we are ready to pay for software goes into the wrong pockets.

The question is whom to pay, whom to assign ownership of the knowledge that is stored in source code as the fruit of software development work. Right now this knowledge is owned by the few corporate owners who were smart or lucky enough to buy the right shares and who happened to be among the winners of the market fluctuations.

Synodalsoft is here to show that things can be done differently.

And Synodalsoft is not alone. Here is our list of projects that follow the same philosophy.