Our names are Igor Farinič and Radovan Semančík. Although you might have noticed our names you are probably not aware that we are the founders of Evolveum. Evolveum is not based on venture capital investments and therefore the control of the company is firmly in our hands. And now we would like to very clearly express our commitment to the open source approach. Evolveum was, is and always will be an open source company.
Strange things have happened recently. There are projects that were open source for a long time. But they are no longer. These projects survived acquisition of giant corporations, neglect and discontinuation. And all of that was possible because of their open source character. Open source saved huge amount of money for many companies. And yet, quite recently the world has learned that these projects are no longer open source. We would like to make it perfectly clear that we think this is not right.
We strongly believe in open source approach. Evolveum was built on open source principles from the day one. We have published everything we could under the open source license. There is no part of midPoint that we are keeping under covers. Everything is public. Every new feature, every patch, every bugfix, every single commit – everything is immediately integrated with the midPoint code and everything is published. And this is how it will always be.
This is not just about the principles. We believe that there are inherent benefits to this approach. Open source clearly promotes cooperation. But more importantly open source is the key to understanding the technology. All the engineers working with midPoint can see everything and they can understand everything. This is also the only practical way how to avoid vendor lock-in. If there are many independent people that can understand the product then the possibility to lock-in a customer is almost non-existent. There are many direct and indirect benefits to open source and software freedom. And we are personally committed to open source. In all these long years we have never ever had a single doubt about the approach that we have chosen. And it pays off. Evolveum is now a successful company with many satisfied customers.
Open source is a great approach when it comes to product development. However, we will not pretend it is all a walk in a rose garden. Funding open source project is no easy task. Therefore, we would like to ask all the midPoint users to purchase midPoint subscription. The subscription money make it possible to keep the project running. Subscriptions are funding the maintenance, improvements and new features. Subscriptions make it possible for midPoint to be open source – and remain open source for as long as the two of us have something to say about it.