Announcing Open Source Commercial Support

For programmers, Open Source just makes sense. We love reusing code and powerful abstractions. Building shared libraries and modules out in the open with other people gives us powerful tools we can use again and again – even if we change projects or employers.

From the business perspective, giving out code for free sounds a bit daft, but using code given by others for free sounds like a good idea. This is the inherent tension between business and open source.

People have been trying to come up with business models that are compatible with releasing open source software for decades at this point. An early example was Netscape releasing their browser as open source in 1998. Red Hat (nowadays a subsidiary of IBM), founded in 1993, built their business by distributing and supporting existing open source software, as well as building their own.

In more recent years, people have been trying to combine the software-as-a-service business model with open source. This has resulted in ideas like the Open-core model and relicensing kerfuffles in projects like Elastic and Redis.

For us at Metosin, as consultants, releasing non-customer-specific tools as open source has been an obvious thing to do. We want to make every project we work on better, and our open source libraries let us distill and reuse our learnings. We've justified the expense of maintaining libraries, arranging conferences and meetups as marketing – after all, many of our customers have gotten in contact with us due to our open source work! Discussions at Heart of Clojure 2024 reminded us how highly our open source efforts are appreciated in the Clojure community.

Even though open source has been one of the drivers of new business for us, actual consulting and open source have felt like separate sides of the company instead of a cohesive whole. The first step in integrating the two was taken when we worked with Solita to bring OpenAPI 3 support to Reitit – here was a project that combined business and open source directly! We wanted more work like this.

We have worked on formulating this into a product, and are now excited to launch Metosin Open Source Commercial Support! If you're looking for guidance on how to better use our (or others') open source libraries, optimization or debugging help, or perhaps you really need a new feature and would be willing to put some money towards it, we're here for you.

PS. Don't worry, we'll still keep developing and maintaining our libraries, for you, for free. Commercial support is for when you need something more targeted.