The Four Freedoms [1] have been central to free software for years. Now, Luke Leighton is offering additional concerns in a crowdfunding campaign to build the EOMA68 [2], a free laptop that is environmentally responsible and security-conscious and, if successful, could help establish open hardware as a presence in manufacturing.

Leighton is a long-time contributor to free software (or, as he prefers to call it, Software Libre), having contributed his first patches for Samba functions in 1992. As a result of his experience, he realized that one of the key disadvantages of free software has always been that those who build it often benefit the least. He compares his own experience of having to work on construction sites at one point in his career to the discovery in 2014 of security vulnerabilities in OpenSSH and other major applications because of a lack of funding for sufficient developers.

At the same time, he became aware that companies like Google have regularly taken advantage of free software and relicensing its work under BSD-style licenses without contributing their work back to the Linux kernel. His conclusion is that "even companies that tell us that they're doing us a favor by working with open source are not really interested in acting in an ethical or responsible fashion."

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