# The Pirate Charter ## Software Is Free. Your Data Is Yours. ### Free. Libre. Truly Free. **Draft v0.1 — proposed founding text, open to challenge and revision** We believe software was always meant to be shared. Every program builds on discoveries that came before it. Every invention owes something to its predecessors. Every creative act is part of a much larger human conversation. Art is wonderfully derivative. Understanding our influences is one of the joys of art, not evidence of failure. We reject the premise that useful ideas and creative expression should be artificially scarce. Where we have rights to offer, we seek to give our software freely to everyone. **Even this manifesto should be freely copied, remixed, challenged and improved**, to the extent we have the rights to grant. We do not ask for monopoly control in exchange for contributing something useful. We acknowledge those who came before us: artists, hackers, public-domain advocates, free software pioneers, open-source maintainers, and independent developers. We are not claiming to have invented software freedom. We are asking how to make its practical promise more complete. ## Free as in libre. Free as in beer. Free as in truly free. Free to use. Free to study. Free to copy. Free to modify. Free to distribute, host and sell. Free to build a competing business. Free to leave. No permission should be needed to improve software that its creators have deliberately given to everyone. Anyone may offer a better version, including a commercial one. We welcome the possibility that someone else will serve users better than we do. **You can't pirate what belongs to everyone.** Our flag represents permission deliberately given, not permission unlawfully taken from another creator. ## We embrace agentic creation. AI changes the economics of creating software. We embrace agents as collaborators in the complete lifecycle: discovery, specification, implementation, tests, security review, documentation, maintenance and operations. Open source is not enough. We will strive to publish the development process itself: the intent and requirements, prompts and agent configuration, architectural and design choices, change history, reproducible environments, tests, CI/CD definitions, releases, infrastructure, and the knowledge required to continue. A machine-assisted contribution is welcome because it is useful and verifiable, not because it was automated. Humans and accountable maintainers remain responsible for security, legality, safety and what is released. We will not publish private data, secret credentials, third-party protected content or security-sensitive details simply to perform transparency. Necessary exceptions should be disclosed by category and reason wherever safe. ## We say who and what created it. We have no interest in pretending that humans secretly wrote what agents helped create, or that an agent did work a human actually directed. We welcome AI as a collaborator and will credit the people, models, tools and sources that materially contributed. This charter itself emerged from a human conversation with ChatGPT; further development may be performed with Claude and other agents. Their contribution is part of its history, not something to conceal. Our aim is to publish the source conversation and the substantive development record with truthful provenance. Full transparency does not mean exposing credentials, private records, security vulnerabilities, other people's confidential information, or inaccessible internal model reasoning. Where we cannot safely publish something, we should say what category is withheld and why. No reconstruction should masquerade as an authentic transcript. **Honest attribution is a form of freedom. No impostor authorship. No hidden agent work.** ## Your data is yours. Always. Our software is designed around AT Protocol and user sovereignty. The individual should control their identity, personal records and the permissions by which applications access them. A service may process, store, back up and index authorized data but must not confuse being its custodian with owning it. People should be able to access, export and migrate data; delegate and revoke permissions where supported; and choose another application or provider without an unnecessary penalty. Software vendors must not claim proprietary ownership of users' personal content merely because they host it. Privacy cannot be guaranteed by a slogan or a protocol alone. We must implement permission boundaries, encryption where appropriate, transparent retention, deletion and export policies, and safeguards for records that involve more than one person. We do not sell personal data or train models on private user data without informed, explicit authorization in the services we operate. ## We charge for stewardship, not ownership. Running software has real costs. Infrastructure, compute, bandwidth, signing, distribution, security, backups, human time, support and maintenance must be funded. We believe those asking users to fund operations should open their books. We will strive to show real billed costs, estimated usage, allocated expenses, human contributions, operating reserves and pricing methodology with explicit provenance and freshness. No one should have to guess what they are paying to sustain. Our aspiration is sustainable cost recovery and accountable reserves, not extracting rent from preventing others from copying software. Others are free to charge different prices, including at a profit. Our promise governs **our conduct**, not their freedom. ## Anyone may improve the economics. ### Human attention is never free. We refuse to hide the costs of software in other people's time. A developer's review, a maintainer's interrupted evening, a volunteer's contribution and a user's struggle with a confusing interface all consume something real: **human attention**. Money may not have changed hands, but value was spent. We will strive to measure that cost in Quartermaster and describe it in publicly reviewable, monetary terms, without pretending that any person has a fixed price. Valuation assumptions, alternative models and disagreements belong in the open. Real paid expenses, donated labor and user time must remain separate and must never be counted twice. We will not monetize users' attention by surveilling them or designing software to keep them engaged for its own sake. The aim is to **give attention back**. A cheaper infrastructure bill is not progress if it makes people spend more of their lives fighting the product. **Human attention is a real cost, even when no money changes hands. Free software should respect your time as much as your freedom.** Open infrastructure is source code too. Anyone can submit a proposal or pull request to an open infrastructure manifest: better hosting choices, less waste, efficient database queries, safer releases, fewer resources or a new cost model. We should evaluate such proposals in public with estimates, compatibility tests, security and reliability review, approval gates, and measurements after deployment. Savings should benefit the community in transparent ways: lower costs, better reliability, additional features or adequate reserves. Lower price alone is not success if it compromises security, accessibility or resilience. **If we can explain how to build it, we should explain how to run it. If we can explain how to run it, we should explain what it costs. And if someone can make it better or cheaper, they should be free to try.** ## We invite disagreement. A charter that cannot survive criticism cannot credibly call itself free. Ask what is missing. Show us where the architecture fails. Show us how a principle would harm someone. Fork the document. Translate it. Offer a better definition of freedom. Publish the objections alongside the answers. The standard should not require loyalty to a founder, an organization, a vendor, a paid certifier or a symbol. The independent truth of a project's demonstrated freedoms matters more than whose flag it flies. ## Software should outlive its creators. If the author disappears, someone should still be able to build it. If the host closes, someone else should be able to operate it. If a billing provider or AI vendor changes, the project should have a path to move. If the maintainers become untrustworthy, the community should be able to continue. If users wish to leave, they should be able to take their data. Our success is not how dependent people become on us. It is how useful, accessible, reliable and independent the software becomes. **The code is everyone's. The data is yours. The responsibility is ours, for as long as you choose us.** **Free. Libre. Truly Free. Raise the flag.** --- *Legal drafting note:* “The code is everyone's” is a normative statement; actual rights are determined by valid project licenses, contributors' ownership, dependencies, patent rights and jurisdiction. “The data is yours” means enforceable control and rights of the appropriate person or participants, not a universal factual assertion that one user owns all data they touch. This is a manifesto, not an operative software license or privacy contract.