Open Source

The world runs on Open Source Software (OSS): software released under permissive licenses that allow anyone to use, modify, or redistribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. We are no exception, our products wouldn’t be possible without Open Source Software.

Challenges

Open Source Software comes with challenges around funding and monetization. Most Open Source Software lives off of donations or corporate goodwill. Some Open Source Software is also part of a customer-hostile growth strategy called Open Core: release just enough functionality as open source to hook customers, and charge obscene amounts to those who grow beyond it.

At Candid Development, we are in the business of selling honest software. At this time, that means our products are not open source–we can’t survive if folks can use (or even sell) our software for free.

Additionally, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI have abused the concept of fair use for training data. As a result, LLMs are able to reproduce copyrighted material without any consequence, and companies like Microsoft have provided copyright protection for lawsuits related to reproducing copyrighted material using LLMs.

We’ve reviewed different open source and source available license models, and they all come down to how much time/money/effort we want to spend on enforcing/suing those in breach of the license. At this time, being closed source is simply less risk for a business like us.

Benefits

We believe there are benefits to Open Source Software beyond being free: the ability to audit the code, dependency inspection, community involvement, and contingencies to prevent abandonment. These benefits are something we try to provide while remaining closed source:

Code Audits

We are able to provide code inspection for customers on a case-by-case basis. Please contact us if you are interested.

Dependency Inspection

All of our products ship with a list of Open Source Software in use, including links to the repositories and their licenses. We provide Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) manifests generated using CycloneDX.

Community Involvement

All of our products have GitHub repositories for providing feedback and getting support using GitHub discussions. We actively monitor and engage with the community here, as well as using these spaces for informing users about bugs and security issues.

Open Source Contingency

A common fear with software is neglect and abandonment. Abandoned software, especially closed source software, becomes useless or insecure quite quickly, and users are left with no recourse other than replacement. We recognize this fear, and we want our customers to feel confident that our products will exist as long as they are in use.

All of Candid Development’s products carry an Open Source Contingency:

Any Candid Development product that has not undergone a major revision or update
within a period of six consecutive months shall, as a condition of continued support
and maintenance, make available its underlying source code under the terms of the
Mozilla Public License, Version 2.0 (the 'MPL-2.0'), and deposit it into a publicly
accessible GitHub repository.