Team Perspective

From Enterprise To Open Source

Most of the autom(8) team has spent time in enterprise where our interaction with open source has been primarily on the consumer side. Now that we were about to be on the maintainer/contributor side, the obvious legal and strategic considerations came to the fore. Before we took the leap of faith we had to come to terms with the fact that our code would not be ours. This meant that, unlike the traditional enterprise technology software, the code is not what makes us special. With that, the obvious question was, of course: if not our code, what does make us special and what will our role in the project be?

Fear of Theft

One of our biggest concerns was that someone with loads of cash could simply fork our project, close source it, and build our vision in a fraction of the time on the back of our work. This brought us back to the question of what makes us special? The answer is simply: us. We come to the project with our own experience, perspectives, networks and community that make our team unique. So while another team can take our code and run with it, they will probably fuck it up. We won’t.

Contact With Our Users

Putting most our fears aside, we went back to the kernel of what originally motivated us to open source: customer contact. Developers who will ultimately be deploying functions on our platform could get involved in coding the protocol itself. We’ve seen this work well for other projects we love (like GitLab and Ethereum) and were keen to follow their lead.