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Tux Machines Gets Kudus From LibreTech at Georgia Tech
LibreTech is an ambitious and fast-growing project we've been interested in and mentioned here several times in the past (and will again some time in the future). It is relatively new and it seems promising for several reasons.
From what we heard, these folks read us regularly. "Oh," one of them told us yesterday, adding that there are future engineering plans "and I wanted to mention - about the club at Georgia Tech!"
He said "the officer corps at LibreTech got together and updated our website to include a shoutout to y’all’s sites :-)"
We're there among the sites. It is animated.
"We’re also in the process of moving off nonfree [Microsoft] GitHub in favor of Codeberg," he told me, "though that’ll take some time since Georgia Tech pays for a GitHub license that gives every student a “premium” account here. As a result, a lot of people here think I’m crazy for even suggesting alternatives to GitHub!"
Paying Microsoft for a prison. Getting young people 'hooked'... for 'free'... while they are studying. Remember what Bill Epsteingate publicly said about that.
"Our club has now set up accounts on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Codeberg, and we’ve started developing our own replacement for Discord - a P2P, encrypted, 100% Free Software platform," I got told. "It’s still very much in the early Alpha stage, but after about a month of work, we’ve got something partially functional that we’re calling Quibble (a joke on Discord)."
"It’s built with Node.js (same core tech as Discord) and uses the system webview over Electron, so we’re not bundling a full browser with the application. The networking layer runs on that P2P project from Apereo I mentioned in the past open-letter email - called DAT. The easiest way I can explain it is Git meets BitTorrent. It's going to be one of the few projects in that ecosystem that is copyleft (LGPLv3 since it's also a library for DAT anyone can implement too)."
We saw some project correspondence. "What I’m trying to convey," I got told, "is that my goal isn’t to turn LibreTech into just an open-source club, but a free software collective for students. I actually spoke with RMS about the political issues surrounding the Open Source Initiative, and I want LibreTech to have no affiliation with that organization. We've got bylaws due soon, and I think I might try to sneak that in there so that once I'm graduated it will take an officer vote before the club can do anything with them. (Might throw in TOR for this one too) Our focus is on drawing people in through neutrality and collaboration with other “open source” groups (like Apereo) - but once they’re here, we want to help them understand what software freedom truly means: the four essential freedoms."
Notice how those people speak about Software Freedom. That should always be the main goal. Without it, we drift towards DRM and GAFAM. █
Image source: LibreTech Collective