Kial mi parolas Esperanton ... unu kialo inter multaj, sed grava kialo.

Libereco! Zamenhof donis Esperanton al ĝiaj parolantoj. Li nek retenis ĝin si mem, nek donis ĝin al aŭtoirtaton.

Miaj vortaroj apartenas nur al mi. Se ne, tiam al kiu? Mempropriento estas la plej grava de homaj rajtoj. Se mi, mia vivo, mia korpo, miaj pensoj, miaj vortoj, mia identeco ne estas miaj, kia libereco mi povas havi?

Parolu libere, miaj amikoj!

The headline on this article really grated on me when I saw it. I've figured out why.

https://www.xda-developers.com/self-hosted-word-alternative-overleaf/

I'm not complaining about the author of the article or the editorial choices of the site. What bothers me is the growing trend of hosted applications where the value of hosting is unrelated to the purpose of the application itself. Hosting provides online access regardless of where you were working when you created the files. It enables collaboration. It can facilitate automatic backups and synchronization.

However, there's nothing inherent about word processing that requires a hosted word processing application. For those of us who remember, the "killer app" for personal computers was a spreadsheet, a component of any modern office suite. To put that bluntly, the world recognized the value of office suites in an environment where they were literally the preferable alternative to the hosted versions of the day. They had the advantage of allowing users to work remotely, wherever they had a suitable personal computer instead of only where they could access their employer's mainframe or minicomputer.

Hosting has a significant value proposition. That's almost entirely nullified when the data that is hosted is held hostage within a hosted prison that requires a subscription to access.

Over the past few months, I've seen what seems like a literal flood of articles comparing various note taking applications. I have no illusions that most of the people involved will ever hear my voice, but I stand by three related principles in choosing for my own use.

They must support open formats that are based on plain text. If the tools for every markup language ever created disappear over the coming years, every file I've written in them will remain readable with any text editor.

Open source tools must be available. There is no guarantee that any given closed source tool will still be available, or that future versions of it will still support reading my "legacy" files. If it's open source, even if I do nothing else with it, I can compile it for newer operating systems and continue to run it.

Finally, reading and writing notes must be distinct from synchronization mechanisms. I want a local copy that I will always have control of. If my data is trapped within someone else's walled garden, I can lose control of it.

The oldest file on my laptop is my .emacs file. There are parts of it that date back to my earliest use of Emacs in about 1988. Any other files that approach that age are also text files of one kind or another. Text editors, command line tools, and every source control system I've ever used are well suited to dealing with text. I trust it because I have decades of proof that I can expect it to still be usable when I need it.