Our mission

Author: Longlight, founder and leader of Edensoft Apps

Before you read:

In order to provide some background for what I want to describe, the first three sections of this article are not dedicated to explaining mission and ideals of Edensoft Apps, but rather to my personal observations regarding the history of computers and problems of software used today. If you want to skip that part, begin with section “The dreams and ideals”. Nonetheless, I strongly suggest you read the whole article to get the full picture.

***

Introduction

***

Computers have come a long way since they first appeared. They completely changed the world, especially when they became available to the masses for reasonable price. But what makes them so special? Some say it’s the fact that they can perform computations faster than anything known to mankind before - and they are surely right, but it’s not the only reason. What’s even more important - they’re programmable. You can choose what kind of computational tasks they will perform for you by choosing what software you run on them, without the need to change the hardware. That, together with their incredible speed and high energy efficiency is what makes them so versatile and powerful. Once you buy a computer, it can serve you for many years by running hundreds of different programs - programs that you downloaded from the Internet, copied from some kind of physical disk, or wrote yourself. That freedom is what lies at the core of computer revolution - freedom to harness its exceptional power in any way possible without the need to pay for anything except the computer itself and electricity (and sometimes, the Internet service).

***

Growing expectations

***

Over the years people have done wonderful things with the aforementioned freedom. They wrote thousands of programs that allowed specific tasks to be done more efficiently than ever before. Many of these programs were then shared so that other people didn’t have to write them themselves. And then, when mainstream PCs and Internet became a thing, large part of our society began using these programs to make their lives easier or to create value for other people. That sudden change in our standard of living made people quite optimistic about the future. The potential of computers was adored, visions of what will be possible with faster hardware were talked about, the widespread enthusiasm was kept alive through astonishing computer-generated animations we could see on TV. There were popular websites that served as aggregates of non-commercial software that was carefully reviewed to make sure it’s worth recommending. People were making new, better software and finding new uses for computers at a rapid pace. It was more about discovering possibilities and bringing innovation than about making money off everything. That was the reality in the late 90s and early 2000s. We had everything we needed to progress into that bright future we expected to come. We just had to wait for new hardware to come out and new exciting projects to be brought online, further improving our lives.

***

The disappointment

***

And so the time has passed. It’s year 2025 now (at the time of writing this article). The important question to ask is - did that bright future really come? If you ask me, I don’t think so. Sure, there were some innovations (like smartphones, Wi-Fi, modern VR headsets), but many things have changed for the worse, especially if we look at the software that’s available today. Given a specific task we want to accomplish, how much choice do we have when picking the right software for it? In most cases the most popular options are products of big corporations that aim to make money off you in every—single—way—possible. But don’t get me wrong - it’s not bad that they want to make money. What is bad are the ways of doing it that they’ve chosen (and still choose up to this day). They keep the program’s code private so that you would have a hard time figuring out what it actually does once you run it. They hide malicious features in their programs that spy on you and send collected data to them so that they could sell it to advertisers or other third parties. In many cases you, the User, are not their real customer and main source of profit - the advertisers are. Such applications are not made for your good, but for advertisers’. And advertisers want data. Your data. In the worst case such applications are just spyware in disguise, doing the bare minimum required for you to keep using it, not having any better choices. But someone may now say “then just find a better alternative, the Internet is full of them”. The problem is - it’s not that simple. It’s way harder than it used to be. Internet seems messy today, it’s filled with ads, popular search engines are getting worse at helping you find valuable content because they prioritize sites that pay to be prioritized. If you try to search for alternatives for specific software, in most cases you’ll find products of other companies that adopt a subscription model and work in web browser as services (which is, again, a convenient way to collect user data), you’ll find paid proprietary software, you’ll find programs that are available for free but filled with annoying ads or viruses. And if you’re patient enough, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll find free and open-source programs without any form of monetization, only to find out that most of them are outdated, incomplete, poorly written, unpractical, hard to use and find support for, or all of the above. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all kinds of software, but it’s really common nowadays. It almost looks like if you want free software that doesn’t spy on you, then you’re stuck with programs that functionally take you back to 2010 at best. I’m sick of it and I want to say “enough”.

***

The dreams and ideals

***

I want to live in a world where widely available software gets better and better over time. I want to live in a world where Internet protects anonymity, software protects privacy, and computers protect freedom. And also - I want to live in a world where no one expects you to pay for any kind of software that uses only your own computer’s resources to do its work.

But don’t get me wrong here - it’s not that I want programmers to work for free. Like all working people, no matter their profession - they deserve to be paid for what they do, for their time and effort put into creating something, as long as it is of value for someone else. It’s just that the software itself, the effect of their work, that specific piece of information (instructions for a computer) that they’ve crafted, should be free for anyone who comes across it after it’s been published. It should also be free to modify and use in any way that doesn’t break the law, just like all kinds of information that we deal with in our lives. This way of looking at software makes it way more probable that it will be created to have value for as many users as possible (thus stimulating innovation), not to maximize profits by acting like a material good. Manufacturing material goods requires using new portion of resources for each new product, so it’s natural that we pay for each instance of that product. But software does not work that way! Once created, we can make as many copies of it as we want and it costs us nothing. So we shouldn’t be forced to pay for each copy of it. Since more and more people become aware of it, tech companies try a different approach: they try to make everything a service nowadays, so that they could justify this business model by saying “yes, the software might be free, but you must pay for access to our servers so they can do some work for you”. While this justification might be correct, the problems is that the function that such services offer can very often be performed equally well or even better on your own computer (like creating simple graphics), without the help of their servers. I dream of a world where there’s so much high quality free software available that people only use such paid services if their computer is simply not up to the task or if they need top-of-the-line support and want to pay for it (which is often the case for business clients).

***

Foundations of Edensoft Apps

***

Crowdfunding campaigns are a perfect example that shows how much money you can raise without necessarily commercializing something. There are many projects, including software projects, that have raised millions of dollars that way. There are also people (some independent music producers, graphic designers, animation creators, game developers, programmers, vloggers, etc.) who create some sort of value that is available for free, and rely on donations from their supporters/fans to sustain themselves. So I thought to myself: why not go the same way and use my passion for creating software to make our lives a little bit easier?

This is how the idea of Edensoft Apps was born: to form a well-organized team which aims to counter all the problems described earlier by creating high quality free software, while also trying to become a good example of how software should be made - this is the dream I follow by running Edensoft Apps. It’s surely not “one of its kind” of an initiative, but I don’t actually want it to be - there’s too many problems in the world of software, so the alternatives provided by a single team won’t be enough to solve them all. Having that in mind, I want to inspire others through the activity of my team, so there can be more free software available for all of us; software made to work well, not to make money. I can’t guarantee that software made by Edensoft Apps will be the best out there, but what I can guarantee is that it will be free, it will be made with passion, it will aim to give you as much while taking as little, it will never spy on you, and it will never annoy you with ads. Edensoft Apps will always stay true to its ideals described in this article and, as long as it exists, it will concentrate on providing at the very least a reliable baseline for tasks covered by its projects.

Thanks for reading!

If you like the idea behind Edensoft Apps and want our mission to succeed,
tell others about us and consider donating HERE. Thanks in advance!