The Civic Charter¶

This is the short version. One page, plain prose. The longer treatments will live in this section as they're written; the Charter is the anchor.

Read time: ~6 minutes.

The problem we are answering¶

Computing has, slowly and quietly, slid into a posture where the machine on your desk answers to someone else.

Your operating system phones home.
Your "settings" live in a cloud account.
Your administration tool wants you to sign in.
Your editor reads your code on a remote server before showing it back to you.
Your printer asks for a subscription.

This is normal now. We do not think it should be.

AXEM-SX is built on the premise that the machine in front of you should answer to you, on its own, without help from anyone else's computer. That principle is not nostalgia. It is engineering — and politics.

Five promises¶

1. No telemetry. Ever.¶

AXEM-SX does not collect, transmit, or aggregate usage data. There is no "anonymous statistics" toggle to find and disable. There is nothing to disable, because there is nothing collecting.

When the system needs to reach the internet — for updates, for time, for repository metadata — it does so for a stated reason, and only for that reason. The destinations are listed in the Reference section.

2. Local administration, by default.¶

The Control Hub runs on your machine. YaST runs on your machine. Cockpit runs on your machine, served at localhost:9090. None of them require a cloud account. None of them call out to validate a license, fetch a policy, or "sync" anything.

If you want to manage your machine from a different machine, that's your choice — and it stays a choice you make, not a default we set.

3. Curation over abundance.¶

We choose. The default application set, the default theme, the default keyboard shortcut for the application launcher — these are decisions, not accidents. When you install AXEM-SX, you are receiving an opinion.

You are also free to overrule that opinion. Every default can be changed. The base is openSUSE Leap; the package universe is the same. What we give you is a starting point that respects your time.

4. Patient releases.¶

We do not ship for novelty. AXEM-SX 1.0 was a long time coming, and 1.0.1 is a deliberate point release — not a marketing event. When a new version arrives, it arrives because something is genuinely better. When it doesn't, the silence is also a service to you.

5. Independent infrastructure.¶

Our code lives on GitHub, our packages on the openSUSE Build Service, our website on infrastructure we control. We are not exposed to the policy of any single platform. If any of these go away, we have a path off them.

Three refusals¶

We refuse "engagement" as a metric.¶

AXEM-SX has no notification center for itself. The desktop will not nudge you to rate it, share it, or "complete your profile." The most respectful thing software can do is stay out of your way until you ask for it.

We refuse "the cloud" as a default.¶

Cloud services are useful. Cloud services as the default storage, default sync, default backup, default authentication layer of a personal computer — that is a position taken on your behalf without your consent. AXEM-SX takes the opposite position by default, and makes the cloud-flavored alternatives easy to add when you choose them.

We refuse subscription gates.¶

AXEM-SX is free of charge and free in the four-freedoms sense. There is no "Pro features" tier behind a paywall. There is no part of the system you must subscribe to in order to use. The Pro, Light, and Gold editions are curatorial differences, not commercial ones.

What we ask of you¶

Nothing required. But if any of this resonates:

Use it. That is the highest compliment.
Tell us what's wrong. Bugs, rough edges, broken sentences in this documentation. Open an issue on GitHub. We read them.
Improve a page. Click "Edit this page" at the top of any documentation page. The Markdown is right there.
Tell someone else. Word-of-mouth is the only marketing we trust.

Who we are¶

AXEM-SX is a project of Golda-Global Inc., a civic-software company. We are a small team. We do not take outside investment that comes with strings. Our work is meant to outlast our attention to it.

This Charter is a living document. It will be updated when our practice changes. It will not be updated to soften it.