governance
This page describes the social and operational structure of the project: who decides, how decisions are made, where the money goes, how the infrastructure is kept independent, and what happens if I am no longer here.
the founder
Odyssey is a distribution born from a personal vision — an idea, a set of values, and a clear opinion about what a modern GNU/Linux distribution should look like: efficient, user-friendly, power-friendly, secure, and practical.
I started this project alone. I keep the lights on. I answer the help requests. I write the code. I maintain the packages. I run the infrastructure. Odyssey is, at present, a full-time effort by one person.
the captain & the crew
I am not a benevolent dictator locked in a room, indifferent to the people who use what I build. I am a ship's captain — and even though I started this voyage alone, I am looking for people willing to sail with me. Those people are the Argonauts.
The Argonauts are the stakeholders of the project. The crew. They are the users who support Odyssey economically and who participate in its direction. I consult them on technical decisions: which packages to include, which features to develop for each release, and on the structural and political questions that shape the project.
Whether the Argonauts' opinion becomes the final decision — through plain democratic vote — or remains consultative, is decided by me, case by case, in the open. On board, the captain decides. But a captain who does not listen to the crew sinks the ship.
Odyssey is, at its core, a socially-rooted distribution: a community of responsible users who economically support the project and participate in its direction. I am the founder — the one who keeps the ship running.
independence
Odyssey aims to be a happy little island, completely independent from external entities — including GitHub itself. The source code is self-hosted on our own Forgejo instance. Downloads are served only from the Odyssey server and via torrents, which are seeded from the same server. No SourceForge. No third-party hosting.
The history of similar projects has shown one thing clearly: every layer added to the infrastructure makes the project more vulnerable and more dependent. SourceForge is a textbook example. We will not repeat that mistake.
We owe nothing to anyone — not even to sponsors. This project will never accept corporate sponsorship, nor donations from companies of any kind. Total independence, in respect of the free software principles established by the Free Software Foundation and codified in the GPL.
licensing
Our constitution is GPL-first: at equal functionality, we always prefer software released under the GPL. Free as in freedom — not free as in "we couldn't find a permissive license".
policy · 01 · project structure
Odyssey is currently maintained by one person, "nobody". There is no company, no foundation, no legal entity behind the project. The crew — the Argonauts — participates in direction but does not hold administrative access to infrastructure or signing keys.
This is the current phase. The goal is to grow a serious, credible, and professional structure around the project: annual financial reports, public records of every decision taken with the Argonauts, a textual meeting with the Argonauts every six months, in addition to the ongoing conversation in the section reserved for them.
policy · 02 · funding
Odyssey is funded exclusively through direct donations from individual users. Donations are received and managed by me, personally. There is no organization in the middle, no fiscal sponsor, no foundation running a payment processor.
Donations are used to cover concrete project costs:
Nothing else.
policy · 03 · sponsorship
Odyssey will never accept corporate sponsorship, in any form. This is a hard rule, not a current preference.
The only acceptable form of financial support is donations from the people who actually use the system. If a company wants to support Odyssey, they can donate as individuals — with no acknowledgement and no influence.
policy · 04 · financial reports
Starting from the project's first full year, Odyssey publishes an annual financial report covering total donations received and how they were spent. The report is public, simple, and not audited by anyone — it is published on trust, like the rest of the project.
In addition, decisions taken together with the Argonauts are recorded in public meeting reports, published in the Argonauts section.
financial reports
First annual report: 2026.
no reports available yet — the project is in its first year
policy · 05 · code & repository
The Odyssey source code lives on a self-hosted Forgejo instance at code.odysseylinux.org. Self-hosted, not GitHub, not GitLab — because the project insists on controlling its own infrastructure end-to-end.
If the project ever stops, the code remains. Anyone can take it and continue.
policy · 06 · signing keys & supply chain
Package integrity matters. The keys that sign Odyssey's xbps packages are kept offline, on dedicated hardware separate from the build server. They are never present on the build infrastructure during normal operations. Signing happens on isolated hardware; signed packages are then transferred to the public repository.
The supply chain is engineered to be verifiable end-to-end: pinned upstream checksums, reproducible repackaging, cosign/Rekor signature bundles, and a public repository of build recipes on Forgejo. There is a lot of work behind this — and it is the work that gives the project its solidity.
The infrastructure itself is minimal by design:
fail2ban and minimal exposed ports on all public servicespolicy · 07 · privacy
Privacy is not a feature added to the system — it is a precondition.
odysseylinux.org) runs no analytics, no cookies, no third-party scripts — what you see is what is loadedpolicy · 08 · continuity
Right now, if I disappear, Odyssey disappears with me. The signing keys, the build procedures, the server credentials — all of it is held by one person. I have a plan for this, and it is being built.
I am working on a continuity structure: succession of signing keys, documented build and release procedures, a small group of trusted Argonauts with revocation power, a clear handover path. This is a priority. It is not done yet.
Until that structure exists, the realistic outcome of my disappearance is this: the source code remains public on Forgejo and can be forked by anyone. The ISOs already released continue to function — they are built on Void Linux, which is maintained independently. New Odyssey releases would stop until someone else picks the project up.
I am telling you this because you deserve to know.