Mission

The No Vampire Squids mission is to promote and distribute fair software:

  • Fair for users (reasonable pricing, respects privacy)
  • Fair for developers (money goes to creators, not to the boureoise)

Our beliefs

Software has a powerful beauty

Miracles happen when marginal costs are approximately zero.

The whole world should have access to the benefits of today’s software, since

  • Compute cycles are essentially free (since 1980s)
  • Memory and storage is essentially free (since 1990s)
  • Networking is essentially free (since 2000s)

(With the notable exception of demanding AI programs)

But not everyone has access

The biggest blockers, in order of importance, are:

  • Prices are too high
    • Capital markets (i.e. venture capital investors) expect 100x returns
    • High margin segments = high prices. Capitalist trap / enshittification
    • Greed - too much money going to investors, sales & marketing. And not enough money going to the creators.
  • Existing fair applications are technically difficult to install/user
    • The self-hosted movement is awesome, but developer-centric. Regular people don’t use docker.
  • There are language barriers
    • Software is built in the languages of owners. Most of the best, fair apps are currently available in a few languages.
  • Accessibility (a11y) is hard to support
    • Not all software supports all people with varying levels of hearing, movement, sight, and/or cognitive ability.

Alternatives do exist

  • Indie/bootstrapped/small/medium companies focused on positive unit economics at small scale
  • Open source
    • For end users, this works beautifully for local-first software, not so much for server-based (e.g. Firefox, OBS, Ubuntu)

The priority is ensuring fair software (e.g. open source) is financially sustainable

Developers and designers deserve to be rewarded for their contributions to humanity.

Some jobs that have no intrinsic rewards (e.g. bug fixes) should be paid with money.