Open Source at Software Mansion
By: Marcin Skotniczny
Tags: React Native, Open Source, Elixir

Hello, this is Software Mansion speaking! We are a consulting and development agency of roughly 62 people, based in beautiful Kraków in Poland. You might have heard about our contributions to React Native, our work on Expo, or maybe have attended App.js conference organized by us. Alternatively, you might have also seen our involvement in the Elixir community: Membrane Framework. Or, if you are a local, you might have attended React Native Community Kraków meetups organized by us or one of our numerous hackathons and workshops.

Yesterday was the 7th anniversary of our founding and we think this is the right time to step up our game.

During these seven years, people here have built quite a few popular React Native libraries: react-native-gesture-handler, react-native-reanimated, react-native-screens, and reanimated-bottom-sheet, and a few that are yet to become popular. We are very thankful to all contributors, internal and external, but so far, this has been a not-so-coordinated effort without a grand battle plan. By today, however, we’ve grown big and strong enough so that the development and maintenance of open-source projects can become one of the main things for us. We’re happy to announce that after seven years of constant growth we don’t only want to benefit from the open-source ecosystem but going forward we are also committing to contribute to open-source software development.

This means that we’ve decided that…

…we are going full-time with our open-source commitment.

1. We are going to have permanent maintainers working on our open-source projects.

High-quality open-source libraries require constant work, not only to create new features but also to do regular maintenance and of course respond to the community needs. To be able to do it properly we are going to have people for whom open-source maintenance is their primary work. We do it already with Membrane Framework and we will be building a team for React Native libraries over the next couple of months.

If you want to join our team as a maintainer, send us a line to careers@swmansion.com. Right now we are hiring only locally, but in the future, we might want to expand that.

2. We want to get a bit of fame for our contributions.

We won’t hide that we are a business and we, of course, have business reasons to work on open-source. The deal that we want to make is that you will be sure that projects maintained by Software Mansion are maintained well and in turn, we will receive a bit of recognition. To do that we will: a) clearly mark libraries maintained by us, b) move the projects built in Software Mansion to our organization on GitHub, c) communicate who are the contributors designated to each library.

3. Money does not grow on trees (or so we think).

Unfortunately, people’s gotta eat and, if we don’t want to rely on volunteers, we will need to pay our maintainers. We will fund our efforts in part by what we earn from our other work but we also have some partners that want to throw in some extra bucks as sponsors. Over the next few months, we will also begin offering some paid VIP support to some of our clients.

If you think you could use our help with maintenance or would like to help us out otherwise, let us know at contact@swmansion.com.

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

And neither will all of this happen in one day. Expect news from us over the next few months.