Hi, I'm Mark!

The values behind free Open Source technology has always been obvious to me.

However, despite 50 million people using my technology (and the billions using other Open Source tools), very few people actually seem to practice Open Source ideology.

This is why my tech, cartoons, and games have become known as contrarian. Doing what is right in a world that can only afford to say what is right, causes quite a jealous controversy.

My belief is to still do good in the face of oppression, my belief is to still protect others regardless of profit, my belief is to still fight for a free future even when you are censored as a heretic.

While most companies make proprietary services or "open-core" crippleware, I proudly ship fully Open Source (MIT / Zlib / Apache2 / BSD / CC0) licensed technology that is freedom empowering to all and privacy preserving for anyone.

Technology that is easy & accessible, fast & small is my dream. I like to create abundance, not scarcity.

Individuals, startups, non-profits, corporations and governments have all used my work. If you believe in my values, please consider donating support.

Challenges

Even with unlimited funding, there are deep problems that get in the way of momentum.

• Accessibility is at odds with being Fast. To be accessible, everything needs to work instantly out of any internet browser - but the web currently has severe performance problems. We're fixing this by upgrading the web, even though it may cause engineering delays.

• Small things are hard to be Easy. To be easy, everything from the hardware to the software to the interface needs to be composable. Any one tiny piece of the stack that violates this can cause hair wrenching compatibility errors in places that become impossible to patch, making entire frameworks unusable or endlessly bloated. We have perfected designing elegant systems with minimal future breaking fixes by borrowing a physicist-style approach and mindset.

• Empowering one's freedom can conflict with preserving another's Privacy. The ability to use any device anywhere in the world, online or offline, with the same local-first experience requires enormous battle testing. We should not inject rent-seeking centralized servers as a dependency. Yet scaling peer-to-peer connections globally without bottleneck, latency, or hiccup, while still being easy and accessible, is dauntlessly ambitious. But so was building aqueducts, roads, and pipes. We do this for our progeny because our grandparents did it for us, not the pyramid hell of one man's monument.

As a result, there is a lot of tiny technological pieces I am creating. Here are some of the most important highlights:

What is Secure Render?

People dream of the metaverse, but the problem is that existing security standards are designed around application boundaries, not people's data. Unless apps, websites, and games have an ability to securely interoperate on users' data, without it leaking or being spied on, then the metaverse will become a worse dystopia than the web today.

Secure Render solves that, it is a network isolated runtime that only allows game assets, app logic, and user data to go into the browser, but nothing can come out. Apps can instantly show a user's name on page load without login or registration, even though the app itself cannot access the data.

Preventing world PANIC?

To ensure things work, we need to test attacking our own systems. PANIC is a distributed load & correctness simulation tool that any organization can use to verify their apps work end-to-end, whether that be for security, scale, or safety. This is a very important part of any honest engineer's job, and why we have built a foundation for it.

Why call it GUN?

Developers should be as cautious manipulating user data as using a loaded weapon. We do not want Secure Render to be a disconnected void, it must also have as much life in it as the rest of the internet. But allowing this without enabling malicious applications to shoot yourself in the foot is a challenge best solved by protecting your data with end-to-end encryption. GUN's realtime encrypted graph synchronization protocol is the necessary step towards making the internet as it should have been.

I hope you're willing to join this vision and mission for an Open Source world. Any donations help support creating this future. Or if you're a business, startup, non-profit, or government, consider our consulting services if you want to get onboarded into the dedicated bandwidth plan or learn how to deploy your own on-premise backup. <3 Cheers! :)

~ Mark