About

The Hyperbola Project is a community driven effort to provide a fully free (as in freedom) operating system called Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre that is stable, secure, simple, lightweight that tries to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) under a Long Term Support (LTS) way.

Derived from Arch plus stability and security from Debian, Hyperbola provides packages from it that meet the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG) and replacements for the packages that don't meet this requirement. Packages are provided for the i686 and x86_64 architectures.

Hyperbola is a new paradigm:

Hyperbola = Arch snapshots + Debian patches and development + GNU FSDG + Init Freedom Campaign + Privacy + LTS + Stability

GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG)

Hyperbola Project follow the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG). Hyperbola contains its own social contract and packaging guidelines which are the commitment which Hyperbola makes to follow the philosophy of Free Software Movement.

Init Freedom Campaign

Hyperbola's objective is to support the Init Freedom Campaign. It is about restoring a sane approach to PID1, one that respects diversity and freedom of choice. Hyperbola refuses init systems that breaks portability, ignores backwards compatibility, and replaces existing services, forcing into adoption.

Privacy

Hyperbola's objective is to support the privacy of its community, therefore all software in Hyperbola will be built and patched to be secure from global data surveillance revealed in the publication of Snowden's NSA documents, as well as additional hardened packages which remove lower level protocols that may cause privacy leaks, metadata/fingerprinting, and vulnerabilities.

Long Term support

Long Term Support (LTS) is a type of special versions or editions of software designed to be supported for a longer than normal period.

Unlike distros such as Arch which are rolling release models, our goal is extend the period of software maintenance; it also alters the type and frequency of software updates (patches) to reduce the risk, expense, and disruption of software deployment, while promoting the dependability of the software.

Stability

The job of Hyperbola, independently of Freedom is, and always is, to develop a Stable version of Arch. We release several versions prior to releasing the stable branch. The other releases are means to that end. You may find these other releases perfectly usable for whatever use you have for them.

Understand, however, that Testing is testing; things are expected to break from time to time. Testing is just what it says it is; it is for testing whether it works reliably prior to its release as a future Stable. You may well find Testing reliable enough, and in fact others have remarked that Hyperbola Testing is more reliable than some other distributions' Stable releases.

Corollaries to this in the commercial world are Development, Testing, and Production. In theory, businesses do not let anyone anywhere near their Production servers until they have proven their latest release is not going to break anything which currently works, and whose new features or functionality have been documented to the business's satisfaction. This is what Hyperbola's Stable name means: that, once released, the operating system remains relatively unchanging over time.

YMMV. Caveat emptor. You get what you pay for. As the saying goes, "If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces". ;-)

Hyperbola is not based on other distributions

As is described in this entire page, Hyperbola is a fully free long-term support distribution based on Arch snapshots and Debian development, with special emphasis on stability, privacy, security and init freedom.

We support the Init Freedom Campaign made by Devuan and forked some Parabola projects such as the blacklist, libretools and your-freedom, however Hyperbola is not a distribution based on Devuan, Parabola, etc.

What is the goal about receive funds?

All the software in Hyperbola is both free and gratis, so the project relies on the community to sustain itself.

We will spend the funds in development and servers. It is our goal to receive enough funds to sustain the main development team, so in the future they will be able to work full time on the project.