Snikket: one model for a freedom-respecting business that can earn income to fund ongoing development of Free Code
I was recently accused of trying to promote the Snikket project - for which I did a few hours of paid work in late 2020 - by pointing out some of the problems with Pidgin. The long obsolete app that's been the default chat client in Trisquel since the stone age. I know this, because I've been using Trisquel as my daily driver, and contributing to this community on and off, for more than decade. Ever since I abandoned Ubuntu permanently, after the Amazon Lens betrayal.
The accusation is nonsense, of course, mainly because my suggestion was focused on Trisquel 11 (in dev right now) and Snikket doesn't even have any desktops apps yet and won't for some time. Also, I declared my paid involvement in Snikket in earlier forum discussions, where it *was* a potential conflict of interest. Had I not, *nobody* would have know about it. So it seems weird to accuse me of trying to cover it up now, in a discussion where it's not irrelevant. Because I made no suggestions whatsoever about what to replace Pidgin with.
The only motive I can think of for these conspiracy theories is a deep antipathy to anything involving the word "business" or "company" or even "paid". Which seems pretty self-defeating. A few facts about Snikket that may (or may not) change people's perception of the project, and my involvement.
1) Snikket was set up in 2020 by Matt Wilde, founder of the Prosody XMPP server project, as a way of promoting a modern XMPP experience to a wider audience.
2) The staff consists of Matt, and when he can claw together some money through grants etc, temp contractors who work on app dev, or other tasks he needs help with (including, at one point, me).
3) Snikket is incorporated in the UK as a Community Interest Company:
"A Community Interest Company (CIC) is a form of organisation that lies somewhere between a traditional limited company and a traditional charity. All CICs are “not for profit”, which means rather than focus on generating profits and increasing value for shareholders, they have other goals - serving a “community” in some way."
https://snikket.org/blog/snikket-cic/
It is *not* a for-profit company, and certainly not any kind of tech corporation, and never will be. Nor will it ever be sold to one.
4) Snikket has not, and will never, take money from Venture Capitalists or capitalists of any kind. Funding for Snikket work so far has come from grants (NlNet etc) to work on Prosody improvements that also benefit Snikket, and from a collaboration with JMP.chat. The company will run a hosting service, where people can pay to have their own private Snikket server hosted. People using that service will be the customers, *not* the product.
In other words, Snikket is a sincere attempt to build a freedom-respecting business, that can earn income from services built entirely on Free Code software, to fund ongoing development of that software for anyone to use. A business that is structurally inoculated against becoming a user-abusing DataFarm. That's why I support it and why I'm willing to work for it, paid or unpaid.