Time has come that Flou is mature enough and is actually providing value to its users. We believe it’s the right time to open-source it, sharing it with a broader audience and start building a vibrant community around it.
In this post, I’ll share the journey we went through with Flou, making our process transparent and providing insights to anyone on their own path to open-sourcing their project.
Goals and roadmap
Flou was born with open source principles in mind since its inception, but we believe that open-sourcing a project comes with responsibilities: documenting it, making it accessible and engaging with the community.
Closed source was never an option, as we believe community contributions will make or break the project.
Our main challenge in open-sourcing Flou is deciding which license to adopt. I’m personally a firm supporter of free software and its philosophy, but during the processes of choosing a license several things steered me into different directions: my personal beliefs and philosophy and the reality of the market and ecosystem.
On one hand I firmly believe that Flou’s success relies on it becoming a ubiquitous project, a foundation layer upon which everyone can build LLM-powered apps. To achieve this, Flou needs to be as open as possible. On the other hand, I honestly accept that for Flou to iterate, grow and cement itself in today’s fast-paced environment we’ll need a strong business model, funding and protection against potential exploitation by the big corps.
Our main goals are to:
- Create a vibrant and engaged community
- Appeal to a broad user base, including developers and corporations
- Foster and maximize community contributions
- Sustain and grow the core development
- Protect Flou from abusive or unfair competition
Throughout this process, we consulted prominent open source advocates and community builders, founders with successful open core business models, founders of failed open-source startups and licensing lawyers.
Free software
Our first instinct was to use a copyleft license for SaSS: AGPL. For our purposes this means that anyone modifying Flou must publicly share their changes. This strongly supports the project’s freedom but we know that AGPL’s restrictions can be unappealing to many corporations and projects.
Other licenses we considered, like SSPL, BSL and FCL (neither OSI approved) share similar limitations and are lesser known.
Dual licensing with a commercial license is an option (and one even RMS advocates), but it would require each contributor to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) which could alienate potential contributors and complicate the contributing process.
We ultimately ruled out AGPL and other restrictive licenses or open core privative licenses.
We also considered writing a custom license but we’re focused on pioneering innovation in building LLM-powered apps, so writing a novel open source license is just beyond our scope.
A realistic approach
The MIT license is the current standard for open source frameworks being a permissive license that’s widely recognized and used. Its main drawbacks for us is that it enables unfair competition from big tech and derivate work might not be open-sourced. Its main appeal is that it won’t prevent anyone from using and contributing to Flou if they choose.
We want to be transparent about our monetization strategy to help Flou meet its goals. Our business roadmap focuses on three main pillars:
- Cloud hosting of Flou with collaborative features
- Enterprise features
- An AI Copilot
We decided to follow a proven Open Core model with a MIT license and are considering dual licensing with AGPL + CLA or Fair Licensing for these three features.
Changing licenses down the line is difficult, as it requires consent from contributors, so we’ve carefully weighed this decision. We’re confident this approach serves the future prosperity of Flou and its incipient community.
For those interested in exploring different licensing options, here are some helpful resources:
- Open Source Initiative (OSI): What constitutes Open Source?
- Choose a License: a tl;dr; for licensing
- RMS on dual licensing
- Fair Source software
- CLA chooser: a tool for creating your CLA
Contact me
If you have any question about Flou’s licensing model or want to share feedback please reach out to me at raskovsky@gmail.com.