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Open Source

We’ve always loved how Raj Dutt, CEO at Grafana Labs, says about his company that “open source is our strategy, not our religion.” At Datum, open source is absolutely critical to our strategy, but it also has a dash of religion to it. Here’s why:

  • Take it anywhere - We’re building Datum to be used anywhere. In order for you to take it home, run it in your lab, put it on GCP, deploy it on an oil rig, or run it in thousands of retail stores, we believe open source is a key feature.
  • Monetization - We don’t make money with free software. That’s silly! Instead, we run a big aggregation network in the middle, offer an outstanding hosted control plane, and facilitate valuable connections between parties.
  • Built better - We work in the open because it keeps you honest and working hard. We think trust is best built through transparency.
  • Pay it back - Open source has touched our lives and enabled our careers. But it’s also at the heart of cloud innovation and the internet, so we need to find ways to contribute, not just consume.

Our licensing philosophy - Our licensing strategy, which is centered around an AGPLv3 license, is meant to balance our open source strategy with building a durable, valuable, commercial enterprise. We ended up with an AGPLv3 license because we want folks to feel free to use, fork, and contribute to our core technology. However, since we will make money running a cloud, it’s important that contributions come back into the project and that we don’t facilitate directly competitive cloud offerings without separate agreements.

Milo “system of action” for alt clouds - One of the big bets that we’re able to take as a venture-backed company is to build things that aren’t immediately profitable. Milo is our open source (AGPLv3) “system of action” that serves as the backend of Datum Cloud. We’re building it in the open, and making it available to other alt clouds, because we’re committed to helping the next 1000 clouds thrive in the age of AI. Milo helps to remove an enormous amount of undifferentiated toil so they can focus on building value for customers. You can learn more about it here.

Contributing to Datum - We welcome contributions and contributors to the Datum community. That being said, it’s hard to contribute to a system that touches a lot of physical infrastructure without having access. We hear you! Beyond diving into our Datum Cloud and Milo repos, please reach out and we’ll help you find a great way to get involved.

Supporting open source contributors - We believe that some of the most talented and passionate creators today are working in open source, and we want to make that possible. As such, we support the maintainers and projects that are important to us and also to our mission. You can learn more here.