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Open license software strategy as used in our group of companies.

We believe that a company needs to have a strong set of values and being open and transparent about our code is not only our obligation but it also has clear benefits for our users & company.

Why Do We Do Everything Open Source?​

Quality​

  • allow anyone to inspect our code on quality as well as good intentions.
  • better stability because more people test & inspect the code.
  • be 100% transparent about bugs, functions & roadmap.
  • allow anyone to give feedback on the product through the open code repositories.

Security​

The more people dive into our code (especially for code like blockchain code and the id management solution) the more reliable & secure our code will be. This can only work if this code is 100% open source, otherwise contributors would not be interested to participate.

There are many companies who will only trust our code from a security & privacy perspective because our code is transparent and can be openly inspected.

Software traction (more people using our software)​

  • allow anyone to play with the code & define for themselves if the code performs as promoted.
  • allow any developer to contribute to our code base.
  • allow 3e party software companies to further build solutions on top of us, the fact that we are open source is a must for many independent software companies.

Trust​

We want trust to be based on what we create not on what we tell. What you see is what you get. We are not afraid of being transparent about bugs or any possible issue in our code. We are proud of what we create. We want to earn you trust.

Increase company value​

Increasing our company value is of course important to our investors and anyone involved with the company. The stronger our company the better for all of us.

The easiest way to do this is to get the maximum amount of users using the software.

Of course it's also our duty to make sure that people do not abuse our values and respect our work, that is why we use a fair source license for certain parts of our work.

We believe all code needs to be available under fair or open source license​

This means all components should be on a public repo like github. We do not support any closed source software, we believe its not from this time anymore.

Open source licenses​

  • examples: apache, bsd, (l)gpl
  • typically allow usage of source code for any purpose
  • typically the user needs to leave the license intact & show the origin of the code as well as the code itself
  • some are more limited like GPL which is restrictive in how it links to other code (if you link to GPL code your code needs to be GPL as well)
  • code typically lives on code repositories like github.com or gitlab.com
  • millions of people have access to these code repositories
  • certain repositories have hundreds of people from all over the world contributing to such a repository
  • all our core components have an open source license.

Fair source license (fair.io)​

For us personally everything can be open source, but some want to use a less open license which allows people to still inspect the code but there are certain limitations on what you can do with the code.

Such a license is fair source:

  • See www.fair.io.
  • The source code is open & visible.
  • But the license disallows the code to be used in enterprise or commercial context (max amount of people per organization using this code).
  • This license allows people to inspect the code and still contribute.
  • It allows us to be 100% transparent.

Sometimes it makes sense to have specific components typically important for private/commercial context as fair source.