I spend a lot of time thinking about how to compete with free. I believe the answer is to change the meaning of the word, so starting today Feedbin is free as in freedom.

I think there are many great reasons to make Feedbin open source, but my main reasons are:

I want your help.

I like transparency and there’s nothing more transparent than being able to view source.

It makes it so Feedbin cannot pull a Google Reader.

Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub wrote a great article outlining some of the pros of open sourcing software and I’m hoping to reap those benefits as well.

Mostly I’m just excited to see what happens. It should be a cool experiment.

I wanted to thank Karl Fogel for his help making this happen. He literally wrote a book on producing open source software and is in the process of revising it so it was great to have him as an advisor. Also thanks to Alex Kessinger and Samuel Clay for their encouragement and help.

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