Technology and freedom
Technology should leave people with more agency, not less.
I am interested in tools that can be understood, repaired and carried forward, not merely rented until a vendor changes the terms.
A living record
Technologies in use and under investigation.
A selective list, grouped by the role each technology plays. It favours tools that preserve agency, interoperability and the practical ability to leave.
Operating systems
Open foundations for personal machines, servers and reproducible infrastructure.
GNU/Linux
A free operating-system foundation for desktops, servers and embedded systems. Fedora provides a polished, forward-looking distribution. NixOS adds declarative, reproducible system configuration.
Daily applications
Independent tools for the work most people do every day.
Firefox
A free, cross-platform browser with its own rendering engine. Firefox keeps meaningful choice in how people access an open, standards-based web.
Thunderbird
A free email, calendar, contacts and tasks application. It keeps established communication protocols useful without tying them to one provider.
LibreOffice and Euro-Office
LibreOffice replaces Microsoft Office on the desktop with documents, spreadsheets and presentations built around open standards. Euro-Office is an emerging open, web-based collaborative editor designed for integration into wider workspaces and supported by Office EU.
Open infrastructure
Inspectable building blocks for storing, protecting, connecting and publishing work.
Gitea
A free, self-hosted Git service for repositories, review, issues, packages and automated workflows. It provides a practical alternative to placing source and project history under one platform owner.
Nextcloud
A self-hosted platform for files, synchronisation and collaboration. It offers an independent alternative to proprietary cloud storage and groupware while keeping deployment and data under the operator’s control.
PostgreSQL
A mature open-source object-relational database built for reliability and extensibility. It provides durable data infrastructure with standards-based access and no single vendor controlling the database.
WireGuard
A compact, cross-platform VPN for secure network tunnels. Its deliberately small design makes encrypted connections easier to deploy, understand and maintain.
Vaultwarden
An independent, lightweight implementation of the Bitwarden server API, written in Rust. It enables self-hosting a compatible password vault on infrastructure under the operator’s control.
OpenBao
A community-governed system for managing credentials, keys and certificates. It provides an open foundation for machine identities and sensitive configuration without proprietary dependency.
OpenStreetMap
A collaboratively maintained map of the world, available as open data. It provides geographic infrastructure that communities, public services and products can use, improve and carry forward.
GnuPG
A free implementation of the OpenPGP standard for encrypting and signing data and communications. It provides independently verifiable identity and privacy without relying on one service provider.
Hugo
The free static-site generator that builds this website from committed content and templates. It replaces a database-backed publishing stack with deterministic files that are simple to host and preserve.
Open networks
Protocols and communities that separate identity and conversation from a single owner.
Matrix
An open protocol for secure, decentralised communication. People can choose or run a home server without giving up the ability to communicate across the wider network. This domain publishes its own Matrix delegation.
Nostr
An open protocol for signed notes distributed through independent relays. Identity comes from cryptographic keys rather than a platform account, creating an alternative to centrally controlled social networks.
Mastodon
Free social-networking software for independently operated communities that can communicate across the Fediverse. It replaces a single platform owner with interoperable servers and local governance.
Open-weight AI
Open weights widen access to powerful models, but they are not automatically FOSS. Licences, training transparency, data terms and the freedom to modify each model still need scrutiny.
Ollama
An open-source tool for downloading, running and integrating open models. It makes local and offline use practical, keeping more data and computation under the operator’s control.
Hugging Face
A shared hub for discovering, documenting and working with model weights, datasets and tools. Repositories carry many different licences. Availability on the hub is not by itself evidence that a model is open source.
Why FOSS matters
Freedom is infrastructure.
Free and open source software is one of the most important foundations of modern society. It allows knowledge to accumulate in public, gives people the right to understand and repair the systems they rely on, and prevents a single vendor from owning the only path forward.
FOSS is not automatically private, secure, simple or fair. What it provides is the freedom to inspect, question, adapt, share and continue the work. Those freedoms make accountability and resilience possible.
They will not persist by accident. We keep them by choosing open standards, supporting maintainers, contributing knowledge and money, resisting lock-in and retaining the ability to run our own systems. We must use this foundation and fight for it if we expect it to remain available to the next person.
Open technology survives through use. Choose it where it is capable. Support the people who maintain it. Ask for open standards and interoperability when buying technology. Keep the knowledge required to run it. Freedom remains practical only when people practise it.
Names and marks belong to their respective projects. They are shown only to identify the technologies discussed. Use here does not imply endorsement or affiliation.