Going [back to] open source
Open-source, transparency and community powered product building are our core principles from the get-go. An year ago, we made our repositories private in favor of Coop source - an idea which we wanted to explore to address certain shortcomings of the open source model. In this article we will discuss our journey of open source.
Open source at the core
The Sustainable Organization Framework for Technology Development (SOFT) that guides our organizational philosophy emphasizes moving beyond proprietary and profit-driven models toward sustainable and ethical technology development. At its heart, SOFT promotes transparency, collaboration, and community-powered innovation—values that align naturally with open source principles.
When we started, open source wasn't just a licensing choice; it was a manifestation of our belief that technology development should prioritize planetary habitability and user well-being over narrowed focus on financial gains. The collaborative nature of open source embodies the cooperative spirit that SOFT organizations strive for, where producers, maintainers, and consumers work together toward common goals.
Open source also supports the SOFT principle of efficient resource utilization. Instead of duplicating efforts across isolated teams, open collaboration allows for shared innovation, reducing waste and accelerating meaningful technological progress.
The Coop source tangent
About a year ago, we experimented with what we called Coop source—a licensing model where only cooperative members could access the code, self-host for personal use, and contribute back. This wasn't a rejection of our open source values, but rather an attempt to address some challenges that we ran into whenever we discussed about open source.
Why we considered Coop source
Enabling SOFT model implementation: This was the single biggest reason why we even started considering alternative approaches. Coop source could potentially incentivize core cooperative members to engage in healthy self-disruption through forking and fragmentation, aligning with SOFT principles of sustainable innovation and incentives.
Addressing malicious use: We were concerned about bad actors using our tools for harmful purposes, particularly in cybersecurity applications. A membership-based model backed by block-chain access trials seemed like it could provide a mechanism to prevent abuse while maintaining collaborative development.
Preventing abuse: Despite the emergence of protective licenses, we still noticed instances where bad actors would clone open source software and commercially resell it for profit. Or take the examples of large corporations which has taken advantage of open-source projects while contributing back almost nothing. Coop source offered higher barriers to such exploitation through membership prerequisites and commercial resale prohibitions.
Scoping the maintenance burden: As open source projects grow popular, maintaining them can become overwhelming. Managing contributions, reviewing code, and handling diverse community opinions requires significant diplomatic effort. We thought limiting contributors to active coop members might create a more manageable, focused community.
The reality check
However, our coop source experiment revealed some fundamental limitations:
Lack of platform infrastructure & resources
- Perhaps most critically, there are no platforms like GitHub that are built to implement coop source code sharing and collaboration at scale. The entire development ecosystem is designed around either fully open or fully private models. This infrastructural gap made it practically impossible to achieve the collaboration and transparency we wanted with our core principles while maintaining coop source restrictions.
- Given a 3 person team that we are, it is extremely time-consuming for us to implement access control, block-chain based access trials and other mechanisms even if some kind of partial infrastructure exists.
Impracticality of access control implementation in the age of Agentic AI
Both preventing abusive use and enabling incentives within our SOFT-based organization became impractical given the rise of agentic coding. Deep cloning became trivial—anyone can recreate applications from screenshots in minutes, making source code protection largely irrelevant as we move towards a world where AI is the primary driver of software development.
Back to Open source
Our return to open source is driven by its natural alignment with our SOFT framework principles and the realization that protecting source code provides little value in today's AI-driven landscape. Open source enables the kind of transparent, collaborative development we've always envisioned, while providing practical benefits like increased visibility and sustainability options through platforms like Open Collective.
As we open our repositories, we invite the global community to join us in building technology that prioritizes human well-being and planetary sustainability over profit maximization. Together, we can create more impactful solutions through diverse perspectives and shared innovation.