Warning this may get pretentious! In my most recent journey to open source I have tried to figure out why am I going through this adventure. The start was this belief that somehow I am “superior” because I’m not using the “mainstream” stuff everyone every other person uses. That is a behavior of mine I have had since I was a teenager (and I am long past that stage) that I am contending with ALL THE TIME! So after talking myself off that throne I really wanted to look at why I want to do this and 2 the major reasons that resonate with me are privacy and sovereignty.

For privacy it’s a simple “my thoughts and feelings are my thoughts and feelings and you don’t get to see them unless I say so”. I realize some of the irony of that in declaring this on a public facing website but I get to choose what’s here. I can take stuff down or just not reveal as I see fit. My data is also not being mined to figure how to extract more capital from me. I’m so tired of being “the product” for whatever megacorp platform I happen to be using at the time.

When I talk about sovereignty I mean ownership and data sovereignty. It’s my data I get to do what I want with it. I get to place it where I want to place it and I get to give access to the data with those that I specifically want to have access. Open source software respects my sovereignty and allows me to dictate how it all works for me.

What it really boils down too is this whole thing is about my fate. I feel as if there is more and more taken out of my hands (and I know this is coming from a middle aged idiot probably going through a mid-life crisis); and being able to feel like I have some level of control still on my computers is a big deal to me.