Blogroll

Spreading Freedom with Mainframe

If you prefer, read the same post on Medium.

 The value of freedom

Freedom is one of these intrinsic human values that are not appreciated until lost. But how do you measure freedom and how important is it for you? Let me tell you my story.

I was born in an ex-communist country in eastern Europe where I learned the value of freedom at a very early age. At that time, I wasn’t allowed to practice my religion and even forced to change my name. I wasn’t allowed to use my mother language. Not allowed to listen and speak, not allowed to watch, not allowed to read and write in it. Luckily these times are far behind now, but it thought me at an early age to notice freedom, the absence of freedom, and its importance.
Now I live in London UK - a city with the highest level of individual freedom in the world. It society operates on the principles of individual liberty and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. In the professional life, I always participated in open source and free communities and naturally end up working at Red Hat which is build on the open source model. There I help customers replace proprietary software with open source and open standards. I’m not saying it is the perfect free world I live now, but having experienced the absence of freedom at a young age, I noticed that freedom attracts me more than anything.

I have also witnessed first hand how “democratic” governments suppress free exchange of ideas, ban Youtube, Wikipedia, and Twitter, first-world countries where technology is used for mass censorship or deliberate deception. For different societies, freedom matters at different levels, but it matters to everybody, from life and death matters to a simple expression of opinions. And as we have seen many times in the history, freedom can be taken away anywhere in the world, and it takes courage, vision and hard work to preserve and spread it further.

Freedom enabling technology

In the technology world, one of the primary manifestations of what free exchange of ideas and free collaboration can create is the rise of open source. The open source model allows individuals with a common goal to come together (virtually), collaborate and create something that is bigger than what any individual can create and even bigger than what commercial software companies can create. But such collaborative models are only possible when there is a technology that enables effective and free human interaction, where ideas are evaluated, work is valued based on merit and conflicts resolved through discussion.

To create the next generation collaborations, to achieve the next level of freedom, we need the next generation freedom enabling technology. A technology that scales globally, a platform resistant to censorship and guaranteeing individual privacy. Only then we can be assured that individuals can contribute to their fullest ability. Only then we can unlock the world's potential!

A mission greater than the sum of its parts

We have seen how the Internet gives access to the world’s knowledge even in the poorest parts of the world. We have seen how social apps can connect people and lead to revolutions during the Arab Spring. We have seen how Bitcoin can revolutionize borderless value exchange. Mainframe mission is at a similar scale. Having a decentralized protocol for censorship-resistant messaging will serve as a foundation for creative minds to build applications that spread freedom on a scale that the world has not seen before. We cannot imagine what such platform will bring us, but we can be sure it will be spreading more freedom.

The first in need for such a platform is the crypto world itself. With crypto related censorship coming from Facebook, Google and soon Twitter, we need a censorship-free messaging platform for the crypto existence. Decentralization revolution cannot be stopped, but with enough censorship, it can be delayed and momentum can be taken away. Without the free exchange of ideas, we cannot invent, build, grow and spread more freedom fast enough. We need a Mainframe first for ourselves than any other industry right now. The Mainframe mission is bigger than the success of Mainframe only, it is existential for the whole crypto world and anybody in need of freedom.

About Me