The Philosophy

There are sev­er­al el­e­ments to the freen­ode phi­los­o­phy. The project was orig­i­nal­ly found­ed to pro­vide in­ter­ac­tive dis­cus­sion fa­cil­i­ties to peer-di­rect­ed project com­mu­ni­ties. Peer-di­rect­ed projects com­bine open, in­for­mal par­tic­i­pa­tion with broad li­cens­ing and wide dis­sem­i­na­tion of out­put.

Our ba­sic prin­ci­ples are:

• Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers ben­e­fit from bet­ter ac­cess to each oth­er. Putting a num­ber of projects in close prox­im­i­ty in an in­ter­ac­tive en­vi­ron­ment cre­ates link­ages be­tween de­vel­op­ers and projects, and helps com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers take bet­ter ad­van­tage of each oth­er's work.
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and co­or­di­na­tion skills are im­por­tant to com­mu­ni­ty projects. Peer-di­rect­ed projects work be­cause the par­a­digm works. De­vel­op­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers are not un­usu­al­ly gift­ed at project co­or­di­na­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. But im­prov­ing those skills can make projects work bet­ter.
• Friend­ly in­ter­ac­tion is more ef­fi­cient than flam­ing. Calm, re­laxed dis­course with­out an­gry con­tention pro­vides for bet­ter ex­change of in­for­ma­tion. Flam­ing pro­duces sit­u­a­tions in which the lis­ten­er must con­tend with the state of his or her emo­tions at least as much as with the com­pre­hen­sion of a speak­er's com­ments.
• Project de­vel­op­ers are self­-­driv­en. No one guar­an­tees your work will be used, but only you de­cide whether a project is worth do­ing. There is no sin­gle right ap­proach to any de­sign, im­ple­men­ta­tion or sup­port prob­lem, and friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion is a fun­da­men­tal­ly good thing.
• Peer-di­rect­ed project com­mu­ni­ties need to grow. Many valu­able peer-di­rect­ed projects chron­i­cal­ly lack skilled, mo­ti­vat­ed de­vel­op­ers with time to de­vote to them. The po­ten­tial base for peer-di­rect­ed project com­mu­ni­ties in­cludes any­one with the skills and in­ter­est to par­tic­i­pate. These com­mu­ni­ties must con­tin­ue to grow.
• Li­cens­ing must be free. For peer-di­rect­ed projects to suc­ceed, their cre­ative out­put must be wide­ly avail­able and us­able with­out sig­nif­i­cant re­stric­tion. For soft­ware projects, the De­bian Free Soft­ware Guide­lines, the Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion's Free Soft­ware De­f­i­n­i­tion and the Open Source Ini­tia­tive's Open Source De­f­i­n­i­tion pro­vide guide­lines to help en­sure that project cre­ative out­put re­mains free. For artis­tic projects and for the print­ed word, li­cens­es pro­vid­ed by Cre­ative Com­mons and ef­forts such as the GNU Free Doc­u­men­ta­tion Li­cense and the FreeB­SD Doc­u­men­ta­tion Li­cense help keep cre­ative out­put free.

Li­cens­ing which pre­serves the abil­i­ty of new­com­ers to con­tribute, and main­tains a low bar­ri­er to en­try for de­vel­op­ment, is es­sen­tial to the health and suc­cess of peer-di­rect­ed projects.