Secret Society Ideology/Principles

There is somewhat lively debate about what founding principles should be included in the /prog/ secret society. We need a list of aims on which we can agree, and a list of problems to solve. Here is something to start, neither written in stone nor comprehensive:

Basic goals:
Freedom to conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells, to explore the universe, etc. etc.
Survival of the Society
Arcane power

We need a means for resolving disagreements. I suggested we ignore them insofar as it is possible to do so. E.g. "what is the UNIX philosophy and is it good?" is an entertaining question for debate, and an answer is probably necessary in the long term, but it does not contribute concretely to the goal of writing software. So membership should not require that an individual answer one way or the other on such questions.

Balancing freedom with economic sustainability
We want to give our software away, but we also want to be able to afford to write more software and engage in other activities. This is a structural conflict.
Best known solution: release software for free to the public, but at cost to governments and profit-making entities.

We need a name. We also need a motto. "We conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells" has been suggested, and I support it.

Other?

>>7
We don't need to depend on a specific company.

a non-profit, is exactly what we should be doing.

Can this actually be a non-profit?

For the purpose of the following discussion let's suppose that in some country the company or non-profit is called Trent.

A side effect of this is that those of us who wish to remain anonymous but still receive payment will hilariously have to trust those of us whose names are revealed to be fair and honest with them.

Not necessarily; a pseudonymous author Bob is represented by their public key, and only he can sign receipts for purchases of commercial licenses of their software. Suppose Alice bought a license of the software. Then she can easily check that the license is cryptographically signed by Bob, and thus genuine. The only way Trent can screw over Bob is by requesting a bunch of signed licenses and not paying up (which could quickly turn into a civil lawsuit).

A thought I had was that individuals would be entirely responsible for allocating their share of money - on salary for themselves, on computer hardware, on office space or on machinery or anything else that seems appropriate or desirable to them; in this way the acquisition of wealth would be in direct opposition to the acquisition of power within our organization, which I find pleasant. (All this leads to agony for the poor soul tasked with distribution of funds to many people, and it would be fair to hire some hapless bean-counter for the purpose of doing the drudge-work.)

I'm not certain I understand this entire paragraph. Could you rephrase or something?

How one's share is determined will be a trickier issue. A simple hourly rate is not fair to the more skilled programmers, but skill is subjective. This is a problem to which I have not found an easy solution.

Oh this is going to be very tricky.