Transition Plan to Move ArrayFire to Open Source

August 1, 2014

in Engineering, Leadership, Marketing, Pricing, Product Management

I have written many times before about moving from closed source to open source. With my announcement yesterday in mind, tonight I share thoughts on how we will make the transition (written on my phone from a campsite in the woods).

The main goal of the transitionary period is to build a curated community. Open source is not a dump of code on the internet. It needs life. It needs organized life, not all
scattered chaos (though some chaos is great).

So we have 4 phases we are following over the next few months to rock this transition:

1) Internal Phase – we are making the necessary code refactoring changes so that it is easier to injest by non-ArrayFire employees.

2) Community Building Phase – we are organizing all aspects of the community including rewards and rules for contribution and attribution.

3) Limited Open Phase – we will release the source code to limited partners who are already planning on incorporating ArrayFire into their workflow in a substantive way.

4) Fully Open Phase – the public final release.

I’m excited to build a great community. We hope to wrap up all these phases in advance of SC14. if you have ever wanted to be at the ground level of an open source community, this is a great time to jump in. If you are interested in participating in this effort, you can contact me or anyone at ArrayFire, and we’ll hook you up.

Have you ever participated in moving closed source to open source? What are your thoughts about our plan?

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