Solidarity Economy Hosting

A draft Merri-bek Tech Proposal.

1. More FOSS: Accelerate the move off “big tech” and on to liberatory and Open-Source Software for people and groups in our region.
2. Not free as in “free beer”: Slowly shift user expectations that cloud usage has no cost, as typically those costs are just externalised to environmental damage and surveillance capitalism, without creating unnecessary barriers to goal 1.
3. A pathway to just livelihoods: Developing and maintaining software is labour, and if it's going to be part of our community it needs to be part of our economy. Historically, the tech industry has often increased economic inequality, and by practicing fairer wars to pay software livelihoods we are building something different.
4. Participation in new economies: Software is often the connecting glue that shapes economic interactions. As many groups experiment with economic relations beyond late-stage neo-liberal capitalism, we wish to support this by participating in broader movements for solidarity and by supporting a plurality of economic options.
5. Valuing stewardship: Often the software industry, and the open source movement, values the creation of new things, but does a poor job of valuing the day to date maintenance, and the long-term stewardship of services and data important to our users.

1. Enclosing the digital commons: There is a risk that charging for FOSS hosting will place commercial pressures on digital services so necessary to people's lives that they should be more properly be considered a commons.
2. Barriers to entry: Charging for software could, at best, slow down the rate at which people move off big tech (especially since we're often competing with a free product), and at worse act as a barrier to access for people who most need the services.
3. Increase class divide: Software professionals have often earned way more than blue-collar workers, creating a tendency for the tech industry to act in reactionary ways (in service of bosses and billionaires rather than fellow workers).