Open source¶
In Nextbit, we deeply believe in the strenght of open source software. Therefore, when possible, we publish our software under an open source license in our Github organization.
Should I publish my project under an open source license?¶
This depends on a lot of different factors:
Does Nextbit have the Intellectual Property (IP) of the project? (e.g. it is something we haven’t developed for a third party customer)
Is the project part of our core business or not? (e.g. ML algorithms, high performance solutions)
Can be the project of general interest? (e.g. it is something that can be applied in a generic way, and it is not strictly tighted to our closed source code)
If you are in doubt, ask your PM.
Why open source?¶
We use open source software every day at work: all our projects are based on open source languages, software and tools. We’d like to give back a bit. This is also why you are encouraged to fix upstream bugs, when you find any.
We think our work can be useful to someone else: information wants to be free, and ideas can grow more when they are free to travel.
We think we can learn from others: when the code is open source, other developers can propose patches and report bugs. We believe we have to learn from anyone, and we like to see feedbacks on our code.
Which license should I use?¶
If you’re starting from a blank slate, it’s hard to go wrong with the MIT License. It’s short, very easy to understand, and allows anyone to do anything so long as they keep a copy of the license, including your copyright notice. You’ll be able to release the project under a different license if you ever need to.
*from opensource.guide*
You can otherwise take a look to Choose a license to see if any other license better suits your needs
Why GitHub and not GitLab?¶
While we ❤ GitLab, at the moment it doesn’t have the momentum GitHub has to publicly share projects: GitHub is still the de facto standard for companies to share open source projects (among the others, Microsoft and Google use it instead of their own solutions).
The market evolves, so we will consider to move to GitLab, if we think it’s the case.
Public projects¶
Rapido: Rapido helps you to write web documents with the only use of HTML snippets, it is designed with a focus on usability and frugality.