What if the whole stack were free?

What if an organization just gave away everything the other companies charge for?

And what if the thing they gave away had no strings attached, never calling home to the developer, never locking you into some new dependency?

Operating systems, app stores, hardware, apps: all of these are designed to extract. But what if the whole stack were free? What if it were all open, inspectable, forkable, and low-friction?

Why not? Why shouldn’t we have this? Why can’t we?

We can. We should. And now, we do.

Finally, some Tech of Our Own, for a change.

Transcript

Social media has been destroying our societies and democracies for a long time, and artificial intelligence is only going to make it worse. They’re already embedded. We are the product. They’re just extracting data and building dependency.

But the problem is not just that. The entire value chain, from the motherboard, the hardware manufacturers, the operating system providers like Windows 11, Android, and iOS, is compromised. The app stores are choke points, algorithmically showing us apps that extract, and the apps themselves have to turn a profit just to show up in our feeds.

So what’s the solution? We need to build the entire stack, from motherboard to app, free and open source. Open-source hardware. Open-source software. Let me show you.

So here is the OurBox progressive web app on our phone. We have files without Google Drive. We have notes without Apple Notes. We have a to-do app that doesn’t track us. And we have a chat app. So here, let’s go ahead and say, “Hey, I want you to help me think through which candidates represent me best, okay?”

All right. Now, this is running an open-source model on the CPU of this machine. But when we put in this used data-center GPU with 16 gigabytes of RAM, we’re going to be able to use much better models. This Nvidia Jetson has 16 gigabytes. These are compute-module-based ones.

I gave this Raspberry Pi OurBox to a friend, to a neighbor. She plugged it in at her house and immediately had these apps on her network.

All we need to do is get one of these USB sticks. And of course you can create your own into China, North Korea, and it’s game over for censorship.

I’m John Benac, and I need your help to spread this.