What is Alveole? What does it do?¶
Alveole is a source forge dedicated to free software for social economy enterprises such as cooperatives, assocations, mutuals, NGO...
Alveole has three goals:
- To bring togethe+r IT who want to engage in projects which "make sense" on a social point of view;
- +"Liberate" software that have already been developed by organizations of the social economy so that other organizations can also use it;
- Collect social economy needs in terms of software so that IT dedicated to free software can help fullfiling them.
Alveole is not only a place where we forge software: it is a meeting place between players and free players in the social economy, projects that are meaningful socio Economic-development capabilities and computing, free software users and developers ...
A place to meet, a place to exchange good practices, a place to produce software - Alveole is all that at once!
Several definitions to start with:
- A Forge is, in the strict sense, a virtual place where IT professionals can work together to develop software. In a broader sense, which is the one we promote, is also a meeting place. Meetings between different projects, meetings between users and software developers; meetings between organizations that need software and communities that can develop it.
- Free software: [defined in the article titled Social Economy - Free software: the time of the Alliance] Free software is software that can be run freely, studied, modified and distributed around. It is opposed to proprietary software in that their code is "accessible" while that proprietary software is "privatized". The accessibility is both technical and legal. Technically, the source code of free software is "readable" by humans, whereas that proprietary software is distributed in machine language, making it unreadable even by IT. In legal terms, free software is protected by "free licenses" that ensure they will never be privatized and will remain a common good.
- Social economy: social economy enterprises are defined by their status: they are either cooperatives (SCOP CICS ...), associations, unions or mutual foundations. We also aim at businesses that try to helping people in difficulties, fair trade, sustainable development ...
- Socially Responsible Finance : financial institutions that take into account, in their investment decisions, the governance and management of enterprises and their social and environmental impacts.
