Someone has to decide what goes into a software build . You can ' t just compile a wikipedia style everybody has write access codebase into a working product . The software freedom and decentralization you talk about will never exist . It will always be steered by groups with the ability to form a functional organization to code and maintain the software . It ' s like a presidential election . The only freedom you actually have is to run the software that is the closest approximation to you want . <| sep |> It was never going to be able to create a clean bubble around itself , no matter how good the filtration . Air moves around . What matters is whether it can scale to reduce pollution on the margin in combination with electric cars and burning less coal . Put one on every block , power it with clean energy , and it seems like a plausible part of a clean air solution .