FOSSit!’s mission is to provide a competitive alternative to the market’s current privacy-invading smart-home offerings from Big-Tech through the power and transparency provided by FOSS. FOSSit! is a stand against the industry trends of unscrupulously abusing people’s data by squeezing every last cent out of it; a stand against the impending surveillance-state dystopia. Our mission is to revolutionize the world by making open-source the new standard.
We are entering the smart-home market to sell privacy, not surveillance. We pledge that all our products will be open-source with unlocked bootloaders to empower people to modify devices as desired and to crowdsource development efforts partially. All server-side software will also be open-source, allowing tech-savvy users to self-host. We pledge to avoid adhesive, plastic clips, and other anti-consumer product construction methods that diminish user repairability. We hate planned obsolescence. We believe in building a reputation for long-lasting products that are hard to kill, instead of making choices in the interest of short-term profit.
After expanding to all sectors of the smart-home market, we plan to expand into the home appliance market with everything from light fixtures, to washing machines, to refrigerators and other “IoT-able” home electronics/appliances. If it can have electronics of any kind in it, we want to make competitive, high-quality, FOSS, user-hackable alternative products that will garner all types of users in their own right, not just freedom/privacy-conscious people. It will possibly be most effective to acquire existing appliance brands and make them open-source, rather than building from the ground up.
All applicable products will offer an optional subscription service allowing plug-and-play convenience for the average user. Enthusiasts will have the option to self-host by using our open source server’s backend software. While subscription services are necessary to compete with mainstream products and to appeal to non-technical users, all FOSSit!’s services will be built with open source end-to-end encryption. Those who choose to subscribe will provide a stream of ongoing revenue to fund further development and expansion into more sectors.
We also intend to expand into printers. Printers suck, and that needs to change. FOSSit! printers will not have DRM on ‘compatible’ ink. We have plans to “PC-ify” printers by making parts standardized and interchangeable. Our printers will use a FOSS OS that we will push for industry-wide adoption to increase the support longevity of the printers that use it. Physical and electrical schematics will be made available, empowering users to 3D-print replacement parts. We believe there is a way to construct a GPL-equivalent license/patent for hardware that dictates that other products which incorporate any FOSS designs, must also be fully FOSS themselves.
As we grow, we will challenge Microsoft’s monopoly on the corporate-desktop market by investing development resources in a FOSS, enterprise-grade suite of tools and software that will elevate the GNU/Linux Desktop into head-on competition with Windows in the workplace. This will have a long-term trickle-down effect, as some people will bring their work laptops home, and their children and family will become familiarized with Linux instead of Windows. Consider how many people use Windows or Mac because it was the OS on the family computer that they grew up with. For open source to become a global standard, it must first become aggressively competitive in the enterprise sector where its design philosophy will dominate and then disseminate to the rest of humanity.
We believe that “Don’t be Evil” is a pretty low bar…
DO GOOD, AGGRESSIVELY.