FKPF MANIFESTO
Preserving Knowledge Beyond Our Time
Knowledge is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Every line of code, every manual, every specification, every tutorial represents countless hours of human effort. Yet much of it disappears — not because it has lost its value, but because the platforms that host it cease to exist. The internet remembers far less than we often believe.
Why We Exist
The Free Knowledge Preservation Foundation exists to help ensure that freely shared knowledge remains accessible for future generations.
Knowledge should not disappear because a domain expires, because a hosting provider shuts down, because a project loses its maintainer, or because one platform decides to remove it.
Knowledge deserves a longer life than the infrastructure that temporarily hosts it.
Our Mission
To preserve free knowledge through openness, verification, documentation, and redundancy. We seek to make knowledge resilient — not by centralizing it, but by ensuring that it can survive independently of any single organization, platform, or individual.
Preservation is not ownership. Preservation is responsibility.
What We Mean by Free Knowledge
For FKPF, free knowledge is any work that can be legally shared, studied, preserved, and redistributed under its license.
- Free and open source software
- Documentation and technical manuals
- Educational material
- Open standards
- Historical project information
- Software releases and build instructions
- Digital artifacts that help future generations understand how software was created and used
Our Principles
Knowledge Should Outlive Platforms
No project should depend on the continued existence of a single website, server, or service.
Preservation Through Redundancy
One copy is fragile. Many independent copies in trusted places create resilience.
Verification Matters
Preservation is meaningful only if the preserved material can be verified. Authenticity and integrity matter.
Documentation Is Part of Preservation
Source code alone rarely tells the whole story. Manuals, discussions, and historical context are essential.
Open Standards Above Proprietary Systems
Knowledge should remain accessible regardless of the software used to access it.
Communities Preserve Knowledge
Maintainers, archivists, developers, educators, libraries, universities — anyone willing to preserve and share knowledge becomes part of the mission.
Guardian Nodes
Preservation should not rely on a single archive. In the future, FKPF envisions a distributed network of independent preservation partners — Guardian Nodes — held by universities, libraries, non-profit organizations, community groups, and individuals. Together, they create resilience through independence.
What We Are Not
FKPF is not a replacement for existing projects. We do not seek to replace:
- code hosting platforms
- digital archives
- software maintainers
Instead, we hope to strengthen the existing ecosystem by improving the long-term preservation of free knowledge.
Our Commitment
- Everything we build should itself be preservable.
- Everything we publish should remain openly documented.
- Whenever possible, our work should be reproducible.
- Whenever possible, our standards should remain open.
- Whenever possible, preservation should outlive FKPF itself.
An Invitation
The preservation of knowledge is not a task for one organization. It is a responsibility shared across generations.
Today, FKPF is only an idea. There are no Guardian Nodes, no preservation network, no large infrastructure. There is only a belief: that knowledge deserves a future.
Before we build software, before we establish an organization, before we ask for support — we invite criticism. Challenge our assumptions. Question our ideas. Help us identify what already exists, and discover what is still missing.
If this mission deserves to exist, it should be built together.
Closing Statement
Knowledge survives when it is shared.
Knowledge endures when it is preserved.
Our responsibility is to ensure that future generations can continue to learn from the work of those who came before them.
Free Knowledge Preservation Foundation