Named it: Freehold

The movement has a name now: Freehold.

Freehold is a legal term for owning property outright. The opposite is leasehold, where you rent from a landlord. Subscription software is leasehold: you pay every month, and the day you stop, it is gone. Freehold software is software you own outright. Free license, your data, your deployment, your choice of providers. No landlord, no middleman.

It is a status, not a brand. Like “open source” or “fair trade,” it is a condition any software can earn by meeting a public standard. Nobody owns the word, and that is the point. If I owned it, it would be one person’s product. Because nobody does, it can be a movement.

The people who run their own software on their own terms are freeholders, and the home is freeholders.org. I bought the domain today.

The name also ties together two things I keep coming back to. Lincoln’s Homestead Act gave 160 acres to anyone willing to live on it and work it, so ordinary people could own land instead of renting from a landlord. Roosevelt lived that life himself as a rancher in the Dakota Badlands, then went on to protect the commons with Yellowstone and the parks. One is the individual-ownership half and the other is the shared-commons half. Freehold is the legal word for the first. (To be clear, that connection is mine. Neither man said it.)

Apps follow one pattern: Freehold plus a plain noun, like Freehold Ledger. The family word carries the philosophy, and the noun just says what the thing does.

The definition is public, there is no sole registry, and the founder is replaceable. If this repo vanished, the idea would still work. That is how I want it.