It has never been easier to give away control of your computing experience to someone else:

• We use software and services that are "free" with strings attached
• We gladly publish valuable data about ourselves online at no cost
• As complexity increases, we understand less of the software we use

Software has touched virtually all human endeavours, so it follows that our computing experiences have profound impacts on our actual lives.

If we continue to lose control of our digital lives, there may come a tipping point after which we can never get it back. 1984 is a good read, but we're not going to let it become reality!

SaaS (Software as a Service) is a computing paradigm where functionality is no longer delivered via software that the user installs and manages on their own hardware, but rather via central web services that users connect to.

This model has undeniable benefits, but it also covertly shifts a significant amount of power from users to SaaS companies. Some of which take advantage of their unsuspecting users to yield incredible profits. SaaS enables this exploitation at a level that simply wasn't possible before.

So SaaS isn't inherently bad, but it enables bad outcomes when mixed with enough corporate greed. How can we take advantage of the good things SaaS has to offer while ensuring users are not heading towards an Orwellian digital dystopia?

So welcome to fossable.org. This is the home of some free software projects designed to help us maintain control of our computing. To highlight a few of them:

• outpost is a tunneling application that allows you to self-host applications on the public Internet, while still having some conveniences of the cloud.

• sandpolis is a virtual estate (basically anything in your digital life) monitoring and management tool.

• goldboot is a tool for building and installing customized golden images of your OS.

• turbine distributes cryptocurrency to contributors of any git repo.

• gantry is a "SaaS vending machine" that hosts SaaS applications in exchange for cryptocurrency.

Fossable is not a business of any kind. Rather, it's like a social movement with the primary goal of empowering users to control our computing!