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šŸ¤² Why open source

Many investors and mentors are surprised to see us open source. This page clarifies reasoning behind such decision.

  1. Data privacy. Our customers, beekeepers, trust hardware and software systems more if they know how their data is being processed, that they are not being spied on.

  2. Trust. This is good for our clients and beekeeping community, because they can be confident that their product vendor does not lock them out of their data to charge exorbitant prices

  3. Security. This is good for our Products - anyone can report security vulnerability and even fix it, without the explicit need of dedicated security programs (such as hackerone)

  4. Community of volunteers. We build and rely on open collaboration with volunteers and beekeepers to adopt software as a system and improve it further.

  5. Hiring. Engineers can inspect code before they join the company and after they leave, keeping their contribution legacy publicly available and trackable. We can also easier find volunteers. This is good for the company to have transparency of released features, keeping author intact

  6. Risk reduction. Customers can inspect code behaviour to collectively reduce risk of harm to the bees.

  7. Legacy. No matter what happens to the company founders šŸ’€, code is still available for the project to live on and benefit both the humanity and the bees

  8. Use of AGPL software. This helps us to stay šŸ’¶ financially lean by avoiding commercial licensing of sub-components, such as Ultralytics yolo model, Grafana and keep all of our code under AGPL. And because anyone can contribute for free, we also benefit from it

  9. Good for šŸ’¶ investors at initial phases, because they can see

    1. that product exists and is functional
    2. frequency and contribution of the developers & community traction

  10. Culture. Our company value is to Radiate truth šŸŒž. Which means that not only code is open source, but also hardware, data and processes.

  11. Our Company mission cannot be reached if we patent-protect our IP and disallow developing worlds from using it. This is good for the šŸ bees as the code is public, anyone can contribute to improving their life, not only researchers

We are not the first company to have values. Our business model is based on SaaS data management fees while maintaining strong brand, not on selling hardware.