Why we are an Open Source Company.
We founded walt.id to change the (digital) world. We are here to make it better and to transform digital interactions into effortless and worry-free experiences.
We believe the best way to do so is by enabling developers and organisations to build identity and trust into the web and every application using Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI).
Consequently, SSI must be easily accessible for anyone. It must be open source, because this is simply the best way to drive a new technology’s adoption and empower developers to build great things with it.
At the end of the day, anyone should be able to plug into decentralised identity ecosystems and leverage holistic and trustworthy digital identities.
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We publish all our products under the permissive Apache 2 license, which means that you can freely use, modify and distribute our code. (Find more information here.)
We use this license because it opens up many advantages (see below) and is aligned with our history and the company we aspire to build.es here
Why we became an Open Source Company.
We are true believers in open source from day 1. Here is why we decided to become an open source company:
Maximise User Value
When we started out, we decided to make our code publicly available for a simple reason:
We wanted to create as much value as possible and we believed that providing developers and organisations with everything they need to adopt Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) for free and without strings attached is the most effective way of doing this.
Open source is a critical enabler of this goal because it ensures that anyone can benefit from our products. There are no barriers or filters, nothing that could create unnecessary friction.
Facilitate Change
SSI offers a solution to one of the internet's most fundamental challenges: Giving users the ability to establish trust in potentially any digital interaction.
When adopting SSI, organisations must often rethink their business processes and technological infrastructure, potentially even the way they think about value creation in general.
The underlying issue here is that change is always more difficult than doing nothing. Consequently, the adoption of SSI must be as painless as possible and open source is a great way to reduce friction by elminiting factors like costs, time-consuming contract negotiations, lock-in effects and dependencies from a single vendor.
Enable Innovation
SSI does not exist in isolation. There are many solutions that aim to narrow down uncertainty with regards to establishing trust online (e.g. authentication, identification, certification). As a result, SSI competes with such solutions for different business problems in different markets. However, SSI will also enable new types of solutions that have not yet been possible with legacy technologies.
We believe that SSI must become a commodity to reach its full potential which is to replace (or extend) today’s solutions with better and more effective alternatives, to enable innovations and create markets that do not yet exist. And what better way to make something a commodity than giving it away for free.
Why we remain an Open Source Company.
… and we will continue to be an open source company in order to develop better products, build outstanding teams for happy customers.
Better Products.
Open source allows us to build the best possible products, faster and with less effort.
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We view SSI is an infrastructure on which users can build solutions for their industry specific business problems. As a single organisation, we could never build products to support all use cases across all sectors and verticals. But we can do it together with our developer community, clients and partners.
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Making our solutions open source means that anyone can review and test them. At the end of the day, more eyeballs and brains can lead to better code quality and more robust security. (We do not believe in “security through obscurity”.)
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Open source can be a great way to learn who is using our solutions and how they are being used, as long as our users and clients engage with us openly. There is no one who can teach us more about how our solutions could be better.
Also, openness allows our users and clients to steer or even contribute to open source products in order to make them better for other developers and organisations around the globe.
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Our commitment to open source is intended to send a message to every like-minded developer which is that we are here to collaborate and provide a framework for doing so.
Open source makes it possible for potentially anyone to join the movement and contribute code so that SSI can become accessible for everyone.
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It is quite difficult for proprietary solutions to bring in partners because this usually involves cumbersome overhead (MoUs, NDAs, ...). By committing to open source, we ensure that our partners can participate and collaborate with us using the same structures as everyone else.
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Based on interactions with users, partners and the community, we can learn a lot about market developments and requirements which helps us to build better products for everyone.
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SSI’s core building blocks are based on various private and public sector standards (e.g. W3C, DIF, OIDF, ESSIF).
Our solutions are built on these standards to ensure openness and interoperability. However, not all SSI-related functionalities have corresponding standards (yet), which is why we use open source as a way to support great ideas (from inside and outside of walt.id) on their way to becoming standards.
Better Teams.
Open source helps us to find the best people, help them grow and improve the way we work.
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Open source engagement puts us in touch with potential hires who have the required expertise and share our values. It also creates a public portfolio of their work, including their code commits, communication patterns, collaboration style and personality. All of this helps us to find and hire the right people to build a great company.
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Apart from the fact that (our) developers want to build open source, it is a great way for them to build a public portfolio and showcase their skills and expertise in a widely-used code base. All of this helps them to create more and richer opportunities for their professional development in the future - be it because they want to switch to another employer or found their own company. Open source supports this in ways proprietary pursuits simply cannot.
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Doing open source effectively requires the removal of collaboration barriers. Adopting and continuously improving structures that enable effective software and product development across organizations or regional boundaries automatically improves our internal collaboration and our effectiveness in delivering value to our users and clients.
Happier Users.
Open source helps (even forces) us to make the right decisions for users, clients, partners and other stakeholders.
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Open source is an antidote to vendor lock-in and prevents us from acting in a way that is not aligned with maximising value for our users and clients.
If we make wrong decisions (about products or services) anyone can use our open source code to provide a replacement without high switching costs.
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A consequence of putting the value maximisation of users and clients first, is that we must commit to open standards in order to make adoption and development easier, faster and cheaper.
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Open source is a form of insurance. It is like an escrow of our code itself and of the continued support and investment of our contributors.
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We go beyond the transparency of our code base. We keep our processes transparent too. By this our users, clients and partners are assured that everyone can influence the product roadmap on equal terms.
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Open source software does not only spread faster than proprietary software, it also allows us to ship products faster, thanks to external ideas and code contributions.
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A permissive open source license allows for more rapid adoption considering that lengthy solution screening processes can be shortened and cumbersome contract negotiations or legal issues circumvented.
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Our commitment to open source facilitates the development of our brand. It is a way to continuously improve our reputation and for many a factor in technology selection.
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Finally, we do not charge for our software. It is free to take for anyone. (And for those who want services like support or a managed cloud service, we offer flexible pricing.)