Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie and I have been emailing back and forth for some time with some positive ideas and we now agree on what amounts to an “Archi Philosophy”, a set of principles that guide our future development of Archi and associated services. But these principles have already been written about in detail in the book, Rework, so all I can really do is talk about key points that relate to Archi and quote relevant passages from the book that resonate with us. I want to expand upon these principles and where we see Archi going (a.k.a the “roadmap”) in future blog posts, but, for now, regard Rework as our manual of truth and guiding light.
In this post I want to talk about open source and some of these guiding principles.
Archi’s code has a liberal open source licence, the MIT licence. It means that anyone can take the code and build a commercial product based on it. You can build a commercial product from the code, Microsoft can build a commercial product from the code, and your great aunt Edna can build a commercial product from the code. Heck, even I can build a commercial product from the code. So, what’s to stop somebody else from hijacking Archi and making something commercial from it? Actually, nothing. And, in fact, we want this liberal licence to stay in place because many organisations and developers have already built some interesting things based on Archi’s code, and they use it in a commercial setting. Also, the MIT licence is compatible with other licences.
Here’s a relevant passage from Rework that summarises our view:
Decommoditize your product
If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. It’s just a fact of life. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats: Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Decommoditize your product. Make it something no one else can offer.
Look at Zappos.com, a billion-dollar online shoe retailer. A pair of sneakers from Zappos is the same as a pair from Foot Locker or any other retailer. But Zappos sets itself apart by injecting CEO Tony Hsieh’s obsession with customer service into everything it does.
It’s unlikely that somebody would sell a product that has the exact same functionality as Archi using the code but, even if they did, here’s the thing:
Make you part of your product or service.
You see, Archi is a way of doing things and this is what sets it apart. So let’s list some of the guiding principles that make my and Jean-Baptiste’s philosophy part of the product:
- There will always be a free and open source version of Archi
- Archi is agile, intelligent and lightweight
- We believe in elegant and simple design
- We do not ask you for your contact details (but please get in touch!)
- We believe in “open”, in open standards and in open source, and are therefore open and transparent in what we create
- We want to build services based on trust
- We believe in sharing
- We want to create new ways of doing things
- We want to make Archi and its services fun
So, if somebody does take the code and tries to sell another product based on Archi, then good luck to them because they ain’t us!
But let’s be perfectly clear about one thing. When we say that “there will always be a free and open source version of Archi” this does not mean that we will necessarily work for free or that we might not develop some paid-for services that would support Archi in the future. ArchiMate 3.0 will be released on June 14th and it’s important that Archi implements it, both for itself, for its thousands of users, and for the sake of The Open Group’s ArchiMate Exchange Format. This work is not trivial and will take a lot of effort, but unfortunately I cannot do this unpaid as I like to eat and pay bills. So we are now seeking sources of funding that would support this development. We are also thinking about how we can generate some form of income that would help sustain Archi for future support and features. Jean-Baptiste and I have some great ideas for Archi, but first we need to implement ArchiMate 3.0. Let’s work together in bringing you some great tools with the Archi Philosophy.
