Today, at Streamr, we’re very happy to be open sourcing our first big tranche of code. This, says CEO, Henri Pihkala, is the first of many such steps, which he believes are crucially important to Streamr’s continued success. Streamr’s Head of Communications, Shiv Malik, interviewed Henri this week to find out why. Here’s what he had to say.

Why not keep Streamr’s code base closed? Why, in effect, are you giving away Streamr’s intellectual property?

Well, an open codebase enables the community to follow our technical progress more closely and even participate in developing Streamr. For example, it’s fairly easy to build new modules for the Streamr Engine. Perhaps we’re giving away something, but we’re also getting something much more exciting in return!

On top of this this, openness adds transparency and network effects, both of which are really important to us. Plus, once fully decentralised, all components of the Streamr system will be run by community members and not us. So, they really need to know exactly what they are running on their systems. We’re also big believers in how decentralisation and incentivisation can change how apps and services are implemented and run. In our vision of the future, there’s really no competitive edge in secrecy.

Which components of the overall system are you open sourcing now? What will be released later?

In this first batch, we’re publishing all the components of the currently running production version of the Streamr stack. This includes the Engine and Editor. You can already see a hosted versions of these by logging in on our website. We’re also publishing the bits and pieces that implement the current centralised edition of the Streamr Network infrastructure. If you want, you can now run a full, private Streamr environment on your own machine.

A bit later we’ll also publish repositories related to the upcoming Marketplace as well as the P2P next generation version of the Streamr Network. We’re targeting production use of the Marketplace this year, so it’s currently the focus of our development efforts. It’s also the next component in line to be open sourced.

Why not open up everything now?

There’s very little benefit in open sourcing code components that are new and still in the early days of their development. For a start, the community can’t really participate before the code is working smoothly. Plus programmers are like artisans. They take pride in the beauty of their work! This also means they don’t like showcasing code that’s raw and unfinished. So, we’d rather further develop new components before showcasing them to the world.