Why Whonix ™ will always be Free as in Price as well as in Freedom
Why Whonix ™ will always be Free as in Price as well as in Freedom. Security, Legal, Ethical and other Reasons. No Intentional User Freedom Restrictions.
Overview[edit]
Table: Why Whonix ™ is Freedom Software
Motivation | Rationale |
---|---|
Security | Open Source software![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Legal | Whonix ™ is based on Freedom Software![]() |
Ethics | Whonix ™ developers believe it is immoral to benefit from those Free![]() |
Community | It is rewarding and enjoyable to have all types of people contributing. This works best in Open Source![]() |
Impact | When free in price, Whonix ™ can spread faster than commercial tools that cannot provide anonymity or privacy by design. |
Commerce | Developers hope to make a living from Whonix ™ by selling additional services. (Plus Support | Premium Support) |
Career | Our experience volunteering on this project improves our skill set and makes us more valuable employees. |
No Intentional User Freedom Restrictions[edit]
In the spirit of Freedom Software, Whonix ™ does not intentionally restrict user freedoms. Whonix ™ documentation might discourage certain configurations, but ultimately the user is free to ignore such advice.
In their default state, programs developed under the Whonix ™ banner may afford additional protection against unsafe user configurations. For example, users are unable to start Tor Browser in Qubes' DisposableVM Template since this is a known anonymity risk and recommended against, but documentation is still provided on how to disable this security mechanism.
Since Whonix ™ is based on Debian it is valid to state that Whonix ™ has adopted a specific Debian configuration. For this reason advanced Debian users can independently replicate the same technical implementation. Anything Whonix ™ has pre-configured can be re-/de-configured by the user without restriction. User customization is not prevented by technologies used inside Whonix ™, nor is configuration of Whonix ™ intentionally obfuscated.
Simply put, the end user maintains ultimate control over the final Whonix ™ configuration that best suits their needs.
Software Fork Friendly[edit]
Whonix ™ policy is that the name of the project should ideally be a variable so it can be easily changed through a software fork.
For example, Whonix ™ wiki markup text does not write Whonix ™
literally. Instead it uses variables such as project_name_long
which contains variable content Whonix ™
. By changing the contents of that wiki template to a different textual string such as MyForkedProject
, the name of the project would change wiki wide from Whonix ™
to MyForkedProject
.
This is also the reason why many packages names developed under the Whonix ™ umbrella start with anon-
instead of whonix-
. Whonix ™ source code such as package names avoid using the literal string Whonix ™ as much as possible. The development effort of changing legacy artifacts from for example whonixcheck
to more generically names such as systemcheck
is ongoing. Contributions towards that effort are welcome.