Seven principles, seven years later
In October 2019, four researchers at Ink & Switch and the University of Cambridge published a paper that gave a name to a discontent many of us had been carrying for years. "Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud." Seven ideals, twenty-five pages, and a vocabulary that would be quoted for years to come.
Seven years on, the paper still circulates. New projects cite it in their READMEs. It is the closest thing the local-first community has to a constitution. Which makes it worth a careful re-reading — not to canonize, but to see where time has been kind and where it hasn't.
