Last week I received the official notice: There is now a German company named "Fre(i)e Software GmbH" registered with the German Trade Register.
Founding a New Company
Over the past months I have put my energy into founding a new company. As a freelancing IT consultant I started facing the limitation of other companies having strict policies that forbid the cooperation with one person businesses (Personengesellschaften).
Thus, the requirement for setting up a GmbH business came onto my agenda. I will move some of my business activities into this new company, starting next year.
Policy Ideas
The "Fre(i)e Software GmbH" will be a platform to facilitate the growth and spreading of Free Software on this planet.
Here are some first ideas for company policies:
The idea is to bring together teams of developers and consultants that provide the highest expertise in FLOSS.
Everything this company will do, will finally (or already during the development cycles) be published under some sorf of a free software / content license (for software, ideally a copyleft license).
Staff members will work and live across Europe, freelancers may possibly live in any country where German businesses may do business with.
Ideally, staff members and freelancers work on projects that they can identify themselves with, projects that they love.
Software development and software design is an art. In the company we will honour this. We will be artists.
In software development, we will enroll our customers in non-CLA FLOSS copyright holdership policies: developers can become copyright holders of the worked-on code projects as persons. This will strengthen the liberty nature of the FLOSS licensed code brought forth in the company.
The Fre(i)e Software GmbH will be a business focussing on sustainability and sufficiency. We will be gentle to our planet. We won't work on projects that create artificial needs.
We all will be experts in communication. We all will continually work on improving our communication skills.
Integrity shall be a virtue to strive for in the company.
We will be honest to ourselves and the customers about the mistakes we do, the misassumptions we have.
We will honour and support diversity.
This is all pretty fresh. I'll be happy about hearing your feedback, ideas and worries. If you are interested in joining the company, please let me know. If you are interested in supporting a company with such values, please also let me know.
light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)