Not a manifesto written to look good. These are the rules I build against, and the ones you can hold me to.
Unix philosophy before everything. Everything else on this page comes out of it. The heart of this distribution is keeping the purity of the systems closest to Unix, like Void and Slackware, and refusing to trade it away for convenience.
Keep only what is essential. Every package, every service, every line of configuration has to earn its place. But never at the cost of the experience of whoever is actually using the system: essential is not the same as unfinished.
Give those systems the one thing they never had: a clean user experience, and a design you actually want to look at. The same language everywhere, from the installer down to the last icon. Unix for human beings is not a slogan, it is the specification.
A system that is secure and privacy oriented without asking you to become an expert first. Firewall and AppArmor on from the first boot, zero telemetry, a browser that can live in RAM, packages you can verify yourself.
I think security is one of the biggest challenges Linux will have to face, and Odyssey is my attempt at an answer.
Odysseys are not sailed alone: they are the adventure of people who share the same destination, and independence is what keeps faith with every other value on this page.
No GitHub, no SourceForge for the downloads. Everything lives on Odyssey's own server, which will never accept any sponsorship. This is not a commercial project and it does not answer to commercial logic. No company will ever tell me which computer to use, which cloud to rent, or who to thank. The only people I want to thank are the ones who believe in this project and climb aboard.
Who you are, what you believe in: not my business. Odyssey wants to be a meeting point for digital freedom and open source, not another battlefield. There are other places for those fights. Here we talk about Linux, code, and technological independence.
This is a FOSS project. When features are equal, GPL comes first. Always.
One last value, and here you will allow me my own language, because in Italian the word carries a history far more beautiful than any translation. Gentilezza comes from the Latin gens, family: the gentes were the founding families of ancient Rome, and Julius Caesar belonged to the gens Julia. At the end of the Middle Ages, with Dante and the Dolce Stil Novo, the word moved from meaning of noble family to meaning of noble soul. Then it moved once more, towards the other: towards the disposition of the soul, the way we choose to stand with the people around us.
So yes, Odyssey is a kind project. Kindness between the community, the users and everything else is one of its founding pillars. Here there are no enemies, no plots, no passive aggression. Here we believe that human beings, the world, and things themselves have, deep down, a benign nature.