On-going in different articles we have mentioned community-oriented and -driven software. So within this article we want to give an overview what and how we understand this phrase.

We understand the mentioned phrase and wording to be used for free, libre and permissive licensed software-projects being most time only developed within a community of people, not with any kind of company and / or corporation behind. A trademark included is under these conditions most time used only to protect the project itself and not to misuse it further against interested individuals or groups to prevent modification, build and share the software itself.

Hyperbola is defining free, libre software and culture in combination with a ground base of altruism. This means also that people are acting on behalf for their own good but also the good of the group and community. Using this understanding means that free, libre software is done on behalf for the good of all beings to have data and information in their own hands and to have also full control of their system. We call this technical emancipation as software should be written by users from users, not from companies and / or corporations and granted afterwards some rights to the users - leaving any further change for the future questionable. Projects with a company and / or corporation have a clear course for:

• breaking portability
• ignoring backwards compatibility
• replacing existing services

All of this forcing into adoption of the software itself and making other projects and systems complete depending only on that special project.

Per definition any company and / or corporation has no common understanding of ethics and moral, also no understanding to protect the privacy and security for the greater good of all beings. Acting on behalf of laws does not automatically include acting per definition good or morally intact following ethical standards. So Hyperbola concluded as project that the inclusion of projects with a corporate background is not following our definition and understanding of what free, libre software should grant.

Especially trademarks in usage can lead in our perspective to further issues, when it comes to rights granted for free, libre and permissive licensed software. Yes, it is clearly to be seen also that licenses on the one hand and trademarks on the other hand are also to be separated. Nevertheless companies and / or corporations have proven not to be oriented towards some kind of fair usage or friendly tolerance. In fact it is more clear to be seen that free, libre software is in a dangerous position when only adapting definitions instead of redefinition own stances against trendings to use too harsh and strict trademarks. Examples are here Java, Rust or PHP.

In fact: Companies and / or corporations only pretend to support as they are only interested to have most flexible support for their products and productions and people being active in their so-called projects are most time cheap workforces.

To rely on solutions and implementations from companies and / or corporations may work, but also the opposite. There are enough reported cases, where people are even experiencing legal issues and prosecution for just reporting severe problems within the security. Instead of working together companies and / or corporations see within those a better method for “solving” issues. Hyperbola as project see therefore no point to include those projects, even when they offer some free and permissive licenses same as we see trademarks.

As result of those noted perspectives Hyperbola is only including community-oriented software-projects with corresponding licensing. All others are complete marked as incompatible and being removed or rejected right from the base of Hyperbola as system-distribution and operating-system. Examples of removed und further unsupported packages are:

• zstd: Meta / Facebook is behind this project, https://facebook.github.io/zstd/
• protobuf: Alphabet / Google is behind this project, https://protobuf.dev/
• redis: Redis Ltd. is behind this project, https://redis.io/
• syslog-ng: One Identitiy LLC. is behind this project, https://www.syslog-ng.com/

Hyperbola as project only supports software-projects with a clear focus from the community for the community. If we see that software-projects and resulting packages develop further into the direction being only focussed on a company and coorperate background, we are going to remove it and rebuild dependending packages. Free, libre software and culture is from our perspective better when companies and corporations are kept outside!

The problem here is that more and more projects depend on those projects making them mandatory as users are not questioning those also. For Hyperbola the freedom of choice is most important, so there is also a choice not to use some package or force others to install and use it.