“I knew that I chose not to inform my boss and CEO about such a minor project being open sourced. I feared that the announcement or the source code included confidential information about our business or an incompatible license. I was convinced that I missed something very big and important and dreaded the consequences for my team and my job.” That’s what was going through the mind of Art.sy’s head of engineering Daniel Doubrovkine after receiving an email from CEO Carter Cleveland with the subject line, “Immediate action required (RE: Our latest open source project).”
He needn’t have feared. “The Engineering team just open sourced an awesome tool called Heroku-Bartender,” Mr. Cleveland enthusiastically wrote. “I want everyone to check it out and read through the comments. Open source is a great way for us to establish engineering credibility while contributing to the community-at-large. Thank you and congratulations to Engineering.”
Mr. Doubrovkine shared this story in a post on opensource.com, “Thinking open source: How startups destroy a culture of fear,” about the open source generation, in which he compared his young hacker days of pirating expensive software with the wonderland of free open source tools available now. He also gave a nod to Mr. Cleveland: “It’s about Carter and his relentless work that creates a culture of trust and general awesomeness at Art.sy.”
