Northwood Labs
@northwood-labs

Funding will NOT go to a group of faceless shareholders or fat-cat CEOs to go buy another yacht — but to a small team of smart people who work hard to solve interesting problems and make things better for everybody.

Northwood Labs is a minuscule team. We want to contribute back to the very community that helped us learn and grow.

Open-source to remain open-source

As a new company, we need to make money to survive. But our founder has always believed in sharing the plumbing for free (as open-source software) and instead charging for the porcelain (services we build). Anything we open-source, our intention is to use the Apache 2.0 license which grants broad use by end users and businesses alike. Our founder has been contributing to — and leading — open-source projects since 2002, and will continue to.

Open source vs. Paid services

Not everything Northwood Labs produces will be open-source. However, anything we open-source will remain true open-source (no BUSL nonsense). We will not take it away from the community as long as the founder has a say in the matter. Our intentions are that if we choose to charge a fee for something, it will be functionality that is above and beyond the core open-source product. Or a different product/service all-together.

Examples of the open-source/for-profit split that we like are:

1. OpenTofu + Spacelift (paid service built atop an open-source core)
2. Go Releaser + Go Releaser Pro (Go Releaser is open-source, Pro provides additional closed-source features with a subscription)

An example we DO NOT like is HashiCorp Terraform (was open-source, then changed their license for all new versions), which was then acquired by IBM.

Long-term financial intentions

Northwood Labs is 100% bootstrapped, meaning that the founder has invested his own money to get the business started, and does not intend to take venture capital investment funding. At the moment, Northwood Labs is largely producing open-source software and taking no salary. This is why we're asking for opt-in donations/crowdfunding at this time.

However, we're big believers in how business and commerce worked for thousands of years before the internet: We provide a something of value for sale, and if you want it, you can purchase it. If we offer a service for free, we may leverage an ethical advertising partner to offset the costs of providing the service. We commit to never becoming an advertising company like Google or Meta (who happen to own a search engine and multiple social networks).

As we ramp-up in building for-profit products and services over time, and those services are financially successful, we intend to stop taking donations as the business grows to be able to fund itself through its service offerings. This may not be the first thing we ship. It may not be the second. But once the business becomes financially healthy, we will terminate all recurring donations and instead fund the company through offerings with real customers spending real money.

If this sounds like the kind of thing you'd like to support, we're very grateful for your contributions. If you have any questions, or think there's something we should clarify, reach out: oss-funding at our username, dot-com.