Open Source & Developer First: From Proprietary to OSS. Now!
We are really happy to announce that Merico Build has been released as an open-source project. After a year or so of work on the app, this is an exciting moment for us. More importantly (our “why”) it’s a significant moment for developers whose code might previously have gone unacknowledged.
So what exactly is Build? Build takes our core technology (super advanced contribution analytics) and makes it available to developers and maintainers to reveal and articulate accomplishments, strengths, and community growth.
We are now hosting the code and project as a whole on GitHub.
GitHub is clearly the default for social coding. Developers understand it, and most have an account, SSH keys, etc. Until now, we have been living in GitLab, so we haven’t completely moved into our new place. Our boards and issues are still in GitLab, and the build pipeline hasn’t been ported to use the new GitHub repo, but rest assured, all is on its way!
The security facet of open-sourcing was a surprising amount of work. We’ve been working in a private repo for about a year. As a result, our code was full of secrets and keys, we also needed to address some design-level weaknesses in preparation for open source. We also had to refactor the repo structure, which created bugs in our build pipeline. It was a lot more fiddling around than we expected. Follow along as we share our experience and advice from going through this process!
The license we selected is Apache 2.0. We chose it for a few reasons. We wanted to encourage adoption, and APL 2 is permissive from a coder perspective. Also, it has a patent clause, which makes it harmonious in a corporate context. And it is consistent with the Coherent framework (https://licenseuse.org/), which benefits the entire open source ecosystem by reducing license sprawl.
To ask questions or just say hello, come by our Discord:
Or grab the source and build Build for yourself. How to do that is all in the README:
😺 It feels pretty fantastic to say that.
Kudos and sincere thank you to the people who made it real. Alphabetically, that’s:
- Julien Chinapen
- Paul Goertzen
- Lucas Gonze
- Heather Meeker
- Bruce Perens
- Jinglei Ren
- Lucas Marques Rosa
- Jonathan O’Donnell
- Roland Vogl
- Yumeng Wang
- Hezheng Yin
