A Manifesto for Sovereign Personal Software
“Your data belongs to you. Your tools should respect your time, preserve your freedom, and remain useful without depending on someone else’s infrastructure.”
01. The Core Manifesto
Software should adapt to people, not force people to adapt to software.
Six foundational principles define Sovereign Personal Software:
- Sovereignty: Users control their data, infrastructure, cryptographic keys, and ability to migrate.
- Locality: Core functionality executes on the user’s hardware, independently of network connectivity.
- Predictability: Critical state transitions and rule engines are deterministic, transparent, and testable.
- Responsiveness: Software respects human attention with sub-100ms feedback and zero artificial friction.
- Focused Interoperability: Applications maintain bounded responsibilities while exchanging information across open protocols.
- Longevity: Human records must outlive the applications, vendors, and runtimes that produced them.
06. The Seven Engineering Evaluation Tests
- The Offline Test (Air-Gap): Does primary functionality operate cleanly with the network interface disabled?
- The 100ms Test: Do common local interactions respond within 100 milliseconds on baseline hardware?
- The Longevity Test: Can users recover and understand their raw data using standard system tools if the binary disappears?
- The Responsibility Test: Does this capability belong in this tool, or should a decoupled external utility handle it?
- The Dependency Test: Does this avoid mandatory third-party cloud accounts, fragile dependency trees, or subscriptions?
- The Predictability Test: Are state transitions formally specified, reproducible, testable, and free of silent guesswork?
- The Recovery & Security Test: Does the system enforce local cryptographic integrity while providing verifiable user backup and recovery?