Mission Statement

Sxmo aims to provide a free open-source user interface for mobile devices.

Community & Diversity

Our community consists entirely of volunteers who contribute to the project in their free time; we generally share the ideals formulated in this mission statement.

We welcome everyone regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, colour, religion, or sexual identity and orientation. Note that we do draw a clear line at those who are intolerant to these principles! We are committed to the safety of our community. We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community. This is codified in our Code of Conduct.

We embrace not just social diversity, but also technical diversity. We see other open source projects in the mobile linux space and wider free open source software (FOSS) ecosystem not as competitors but as kindred spirits. We are committed to working together with upstream projects and can not exist in isolation.

Software Freedom

We are strongly committed to software freedom. We believe in the four essential freedoms as formulated by the Free Software Foundation Europe here:

We adopt the GNU Affero General Public license v3 (AGPL) where possible to guarantee that these freedoms can not be taken away,

We want to empower users with maximum control over their device and the data on it. We believe the user should ultimately be the one in control. The software and your data should not be held at the mercy of corporations, governments or anybody else. Users should be free to tinker with their device and adapt it as they please. We believe this is only possible if the number of proprietary software components is reduced to an absolute minimum.

We aim for our software to be useful in a variety of environments, such as desktop systems or as part of other user interfaces. We hope it will remain useful in situations we haven’t imagined yet.

We aim to make our software easy to customize to fit our users needs. By understanding what our software is used for, and adding options to support uses we didn’t expect, we can work to minimize the overall complexity of the system. We consider the overall complexity of a program to include the amount of effort users need to put in to align it to their specific needs.

We believe interoperability is an essential component of software freedom. When customizability isn’t enough, it’s important to be able to easily modify and/or replace a single component without disrupting the rest of the system.

We are pioneers and it is important that our users understand that our software, and by extension the devices they run on, are experimental in nature. We do our best to deliver a working system but are not in a position to offer any guarantees; things may break! Take this into consideration to heart especially in situations where you rely on software and hardware to contact emergency services!

Monetization

All our code is public code, our community is an interconnection of diverse people on various platforms, neither can be bought nor sold.

We are a non-profit community. If we are to ever accept donations (we currently don’t), they will be primarily used to fund development and maintenance of Sxmo, and will be made transparent to the community.

Other Freedoms

We oppose artificial constructs that aim to limit user/developer freedom such as software patents and Digital Rights Management (DRM).

We believe in free speech and the right to end-to-end encrypted communication. We promise we will never implement any backdoors into any of our systems.

We want devices to be usable beyond an artificially constrained life cycle. We aim for our software to be resource efficient so that both new as well as older devices remain viable for a long time. Devices landing on a scrapheap because software updates are no longer provided is a waste of resources and has a negative impact on our environment. Similarly, the incentive to buy a new device every few years puts a strain on natural resources. In this postmarketOS is our natural ally for a more sustainable future.

We oppose the attention economy where users are enticed to maximise their time on platforms for financial exploitation through targeted advertisements. We similarly oppose our user data being turned into a commodity and used as a means to manipulate our attention. We believe these are detrimental developments to society, democracy, and human psychology. Such elements will never be permitted in Sxmo.

We are concerned about current conflicts the world; ongoing wars of conquest, violation of human rights, the rise of far-right extremism, the erosion of democratic values, the spread of disinformation, the decline in press freedom, the human impact on our climate, the oppression or marginalization of significant groups of people. Though we can only do so much on a small scope, we hope to at least contribute to a better world with our software, when following the principles we have outlined in this mission statement.