Why You Should Support NTARI's Digital Commons Development

The Network Theory Applied Research Institute (NTARI) is a nonprofit technology company with the mission of improving the internet through stewartship of open-source culture. We accomplish our goal through the research, development and maintenance of standards for AGPL-3 software¹ releases into the global digital commons². These standards include

1. Origin +5 Publication

2. Broadcast Distribution

3. Copyleft AGPL-3 Compliance

Originally English+5, the Origin +5 standard refers to a study conducted by the Institute in 2025 that concluded Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and Hindi are the most widely employed and influential languages on the internet when accounting for population, geographic disbursion, and developer culture. Languages like Japanese, Fillipino and Korean were excluded due to their limited ability to propagate outside their host nations despite their internal influence and internet culture.

Broadcast distribution is supported by NTARI's Software Development Studio where projects are not only supported by resources (such as a $10,000/mo Google Ad Grant for marketing) but also manually distributed into repositories, archives and registries on each continent ensuring discoverability and preservation.

AGPL-3, a license by the Free Software Foundation, is a copyright method that creates a digital software commons. In economics, commons are often viewed negatively³ but our theory is that digital commons operate much like language. No one "owns" it, we can all "change" its properties within reason or create entirely new communities around it (think Creole or Pidgin languages). NTARI provides the same rights to software licensed under AGPL-3, we copyright it then release it to be freely inspected, changed and redistributed. The only restriction is that we require changes to be documented and released as freely as the original software was received.

How a Competitor’s Unethical Business Could Hurt NTARI

The only two ways NTARI's business could be hurt by unethical practice are government censorship or attempts to copyright code discovered in the commons. Censorship, however unlikely is a threat we are aware of and is mitigated by our Broadcast Distribution policy. Copyright infringement however, must be meticulously protected by a team of attorneys at global scale. It is expensive work that you can support with a generous donation at www.ntari.org/donate

Just Two Ways NTARI Is Socially Responsible

For NTARI, social responsibility is baked in. Our innovation follows internet and telecommunications development wherever it goes increasing human socioeconomic abilities. How we maintain our responsibilities with the global public however is a challenge. Enforcing AGPL-3 across the planet and one day beyond, is a task we'll soon be teaming up with the Free Software Foundation to address. In this proposed relationship we hope to play the role of executor, promoting and facilitating the production of software across the human market, while FSF enforces licensing.

The second way we can be responsible is to practice what we preach: maximum observational diversity and minimum sustainable projections bridged by the scientific method as a ritual. This empowers us to see more perspectives than our own, take criticism as a relevant media and trust those who evolve our products with the liberty to do so.

1. GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3.0)

Free Software Foundation. (2007, November 19). GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (GNU Project). GNU. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.en.html

2. “Commons” (Wikipedia article)

Commons. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 14, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

3. Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons

Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin,%20Tragedy%20of%20the%20Commons.pdf