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Why our commitment to Open Source is… unusual
“Open Source” feels like it has become a marketing tagline for startups.
Too often, companies launch with the label, soak up developer goodwill, and then quietly roll back community-friendly support once the business model shifts. Why? Perhaps it was never really about Open Source or the community in the first place.
For example, a very popular SaaS started by calling itself ‘Open Source product X’, published their entire platform’s code on GitHub, and officially supported a Helm chart for self hosting.
But since then, they’ve raised over $100m, removed the official support for their Helm chart, and stopped headlining their product as ‘Open Source product X’. Maybe they had good intentions, but it now feels like they’ve had to dial back support for self-hosting to protect their core business.
There are also many recent examples of successful tech companies changing their licenses from permissive Open Source licenses to source-available licenses like BUSL, usually justified because of business challenges like large companies competing with them using their own software.
We’re not here to call all of this wrong; building a business is hard!
Competing with larger companies, sustaining a team, and protecting your work are real challenges. But we love Open Source, software liberty, and the Open Source community. Our industry is built on it, our platform is built on it. Building a sustainable business that also produces Open Source software and supports the community and ecosystem is a well documented challenge - but it’s a challenge we believe is worth pursuing!
We’re going to try something we think is different; we’re not saying our entire platform is Open Source. Instead, we’re taking a pragmatic approach to our commitment to Open Source, with the following four key principles:
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If a binary runs on your servers, it must be Open Source. You want to be able to audit it, you want to be able to trust it. And if you’re self-hosting, you want to be able to change it and evolve it.
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If a binary runs on your laptop/desktop, it must be Open Source. Similar to above, but you may want to customise your experience even if you’re not self-hosting your infrastructure.
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If it’s not core to our business and we think it’s valuable to the community, it must be Open Source. For example, we won’t Open Source our entire cloud Console - that’s core to our business. Soon you’ll be able to ‘eject’ any cluster and take your infrastructure with you - we want you to be able to self host without vendor lock-in, and you won’t need our Console for that. But we built our Console using TypeScript and React Router v7 framework, and in doing so we’ve produced a handful of packages we think others using this stack might find very useful - so we’ll Open Source those packages.
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If we call something Open Source, it must be truly Open Source. Open Source doesn’t just mean access to the source code! To us, being truly Open Source means meeting the criteria of the Open Source Definition and using a license which complies with that definition. The Cloud Native ecosystem has aligned around the Apache 2.0 license, so this is our preferred license. And for projects which have the community demand, we would love to apply for them to be CNCF sandbox projects.
We’re also being transparent about timing. We’re a small startup. We won’t release all of our repos today (though some already are - more on this soon). We’ll ship them piece by piece, with care and intention. The commitment is long-term: not just to Open Source, but to doing it properly. We’d rather state our intent clearly and deliver consistently over time, than overpromise and walk it back later. For us, Open Source is not a checkbox; it’s a commitment.
We’re not saying we’ve got this formula right or that we’re doing this perfectly, we almost certainly won’t get everything right. But our direction is clear. If you like our principles and you believe software that runs on your computer should be Open Source—follow along. We’re building for you - not for the marketing, but because it aligns to our values, and it’s something we can be proud of.
Published: .