The Manifesto — please read all four sentences
It is not a demand for silence, and it does not mean we are rude about problems. It means the entitlement that comes with a receipt does not apply here, because there is no receipt.
- Welcome: a clear bug report, steps to reproduce, a patch, a genuine question, a note that something worked well.
- Not welcome: a deadline, an escalation, an SLA, a demand for a feature by a date, or the phrase “as a user I expect”.
- Always available: the source code, so that if we say no you can do it yourself and never need our permission.
“No subscriptions, no relationship — that work for you?” — asked once, at the door, and never again
Software used to be a thing you had. Now it is mostly a thing you are renting, and the rent is not only money. It is an account you did not want, a password you have to rotate, an update that removed a feature, a licence server that decided you were offline for too long, a telemetry stream you cannot turn off, and a permission dialogue that will not explain itself.
None of that is a technical necessity. It is what happens when the relationship — the recurring, measurable, monetisable relationship — becomes the product, and the software becomes the excuse for it.
So we removed the relationship. What is left is a file you download, that runs on your machine, that does not know who you are, and that will keep working for exactly as long as your hardware does. That is the entire idea. The privacy page is just this same argument applied to your data.