Double Bastion is dedicated to defending digital freedom by promoting the best free and open source programs available. One of our main goals is to select, describe and recommend the best FOSS programs that can allow a small business owner, nonprofit organization leader or private individual to do all their computing as freely as possible, using all the main digital devices of today: mobile phones, tablets, laptops/desktops, servers and server clusters. Another goal is to develop key FOSS programs, if they don't already exist.
Many years ago proprietary programs were inevitable. You needed proprietary software if you wanted to install a server or to use a desktop computer. Fortunately, things have changed. Today, there are excellent free and open source alternatives to proprietary programs for virtually every computing task. Yet, now we are facing a new problem: not all FOSS programs are honest and not all of them have good quality. Dishonest FOSS programs can be recognized when, in real life situations, they require the use of other programs which are proprietary, or when the company developing them pressures the users in different ways to use proprietary programs or to buy other programs or services or hardware.
The software landscape has become very complicated and competent advice is needed to be able to choose good quality and honest FOSS programs. You have to know in advance if a free and open source application has a sound technical foundation, if its development is driven by honest FOSS principles and if enough talented, dedicated developers are involved in the project.
www.doublebastion.com doesn’t exist to recommend good FOSS programs, but to describe and recommend the best FOSS programs to date. The definition of 'the best application' in a certain computing field can be based on objective facts, as we explained here. In short, the best program for a specific task is the one that offers the most while asking for the least (in the majority of use cases).
Instead of speaking endlessly about the 'pros' and 'cons' of the numerous free and open source programs, why not speak exclusively about the best ? When users search for programs that would fulfill their requirements, what they want to find is not a good program, but the best program available, so that they won’t waste computing resources, time, patience and money with mediocre software.
Another goal is to publish only essential information on essential topics. We aim to make all our articles as short and easy to read as possible, with as much information as possible packed in the smallest space possible. The Internet is teeming with long articles on unimportant topics, full of irrelevant information. This makes any useful information drown in an ocean of trivia, to which we don't intend to add a single drop.