Friend Software Labs is moving development to Github
By: Hogne Titlestad, Co-Ceo, Founder, Friend Software
Tags: Blockchain, Cloud Computing, Operating Systems, Open Source, Decentralization

The FriendUP project is maturing, and in order to increase the scope of our development activity and include open source developers from all over the world, we are moving our own development activity to Github. This allows everyone to stay up-to-date with our daily grind, and it will pull our emerging community closer together.

For the past four and a half years, we have operated using two repositories. Our daily activities were committed into our private repository, while every stable release was deposited to Github with several months inbetween.

This strategy was useful while nurturing the project in the formative years of the project — creating a track for the first stable versions of the platform. Now that the base of Friend has been manifested, we feel ready to include others at every level.

Friend is finally maturing into a fully fledged cloud platform for real users.

With Friend, we aim to produce an Internet Operating System for users and developers all over the world, following in the footsteps of Linux and BSD operating systems seen from a humanitarian perspective, with a strong focus on user experience, ease of use and network computing. This can only work if we build a healthy, world-wide community of developers and creatives; which is why we are making this pivotal change in development strategy.

At the moment, Friend is tuned for B2B (business to business) and B2G (business to government) markets — which ought to be understood as a kind of low hanging fruit strategy seen from a marketing perspective. B2C (business to consumer) is much harder, and will take more time, but we will get there together.

Contributor agreement

We have decided to utilize a contributor agreement as the instrument to on-board developers into the Friend project. The reason for doing so is that we want to prevent fragmentation while we are building the fundamental first versions of Friend.

Our company will provide professional support and financing into the project, which means that we can ensure that the platform has ear-marked activity and project management that can steer the technology in the direction of real world users. In our assessment, open source projects take many years to get to a user friendly state, and we want to accelerate this by being active participants with our funds, employed staff and partners.

Our chosen contributor agreement enables Friend Software Labs to benefit from the activity in the open source project, while you, the developer, retain your rights as a contributor, under which license you are contributing.

Vision

The world needs an alternative to Chrome OS, the Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS and others. Big Tech is growing old, and users are looking for a privacy oriented platform where they can work, collaborate, create, compute and publish. Friend is such a platform, and it is being built for and by its users. Given enough love, passion and commitment, we will energize the movement to decentralize information technology and infrastructure, it being for Blockchain, decentralized storage, compute, communication and even internet freedom itself.

Please check out our website: https://friendup.cloud/

Our Github project page: https://github.com/friendupcloud/friendup/