What's next?
Thank you very much for the support! The past days were pretty intense and we really didn't expect such traction.
We sincerely apologize for the bugs and latencies: our systems were not scaled to handle the load
(which in a sense is good news 😊).
Here are some clarifications about the master plan and more details about the next steps.
Clarifications
How can we be sure the project won't shutdown in a few weeks?
We currently are a core team of 2 with enough funds
to eat for years. The goal is to grow quickly to hit current monopolies hard and surgically.
In a few weeks billing will be released and thus the beginning of the enterprise offering: Phaser - The cloud native security scanner, to secure revenues to scale.
Bloom is 'free as in speech, not as in beer'. As a reminder, here is the business plan.
In parallel, we released Bloom's code because we sincerely think that open software/data/science... is an industrial revolution
enabling global scale collaboration and thus we expect community to contribute (whether it's code, bug reports, feature suggestions...).
Coming from 42 and EDHEC, we are relatively well connected and if we need to raise capital to accelerate the pursuit of our mission,
we will.
Also, we love ramen 😉.
What will you do if other companies use your work to hijack some of your revenues?
It would be fantastic!
We believe that business models relying on donations to survive is not the right way to tackle current monopolies.
Thanks to the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 we use, if some modifies our work they are bound by law to redistribute it under the same terms. Thus, they will be able to pay more people to work on Bloom's codebase and we enter the free software virtuous circle.
In our vision, tomorrow's world is composed of a federation of Bloom providers, like email providers today
(or matrix or Mastodon).
Also, we have a lot of hacker friends in case some try to trick the law 🙃.
You copy Big G. You stupid.
It's not a question.
Providing the same services as internet giants (or NextCloud, or others...) is just a side effect
of our mission: Empowering the world with open technologies. If tomorrow the world need open source tractors
or an open source 3D printed electric bike, we will build it.
We've dared the big G comparison because we have a plan to have the same impact on the world, nothing less.
Big players have missed the free and open source software turn to build a sustainable future and use it
as a strategic asset.
We will fix it.
We are playing the infinite game.
You communist. You idiot.
Again, it's not a question, but no. We believe that sharing and collaboration is the only
way to build a sustainable future in a finite world, it's totally different.
Our point is not that wealth should be equally distributed in the world. Our point is that extreme inequalities (and growing)
can only create more and more social crises and it's really a very very bad idea while humanity is facing the ecological crisis.
Are you crazy?
It's not clinically proven (yet).
Next steps
Project management and contributions
We will use GitLab's awesome project management tools to coordinate.
You can read here more details
about the workflow.
We will use the Git flow (on the dev branch instead of develop), therefore merge requests on master won't be accepted.
Contributors should create requests to merge to dev. All development must happen on the dev branch.
All the project management happens on GitLab.
We work on 1 week/sprint basis.
Releases will happen every Sunday mornings to allow Sunday afternoons to catch bugs and eventually rollback.
Weekly sprints will also be planned on Sunday afternoons.
How to report bugs?
The best places to report bugs are (in the following order):
How to suggest features or improvements?
The best places to suggest features or improvements are (in the following order):
Roadmap
You can track the current (and next sprints) on the following page: https://github.com/skerkour/bloom.
You can find this week's sprint here: https://github.com/skerkour/bloom/5.
At large, the roadmap stays the same.
