Someday, my father is going to die. I’m not looking forward to it, but it has to happen eventually. Someday, I will die and my son will be left with my world. I’m not looking forward to that either.

If my wife and I were to die today, my son would have to wait at least 10-15 years before he would be old enough to begin digging through our lives. Hopefully, Facebook and Instagram would still be around so he could see us holding him, playing with him. Hopefully Github would still be around, and my account would still have access to all the private repositories I’m a part of so he could read my funny comments. Hopefully the world as it is now, would still exist in 10-15 years.

As much as it pains me to write this, there are children alive right now in this position… and there may be more tomorrow.

In the last decade, we’ve made more and more of a move to “privacy,” closed source code, and we’ve pushed the boundaries of scalability … just to make a few more dollars for our investors. I don’t think that is a bad thing. I think it is one of the most amazing things of our time. But, at the end of the day, do you think that anyone has code that just has to be kept hidden?

Nine-tenths of any company is execution. No one is going to steal your software and compete with you. Unless they have better talent, better sales(wo)men, etc, they would only hurt themselves by competing with you with your own code.

I hate to say this, but: software is pizza. Any half decent developer can make it, it’s the process and the execution that make it good — or awful. There are very few things in the business software world that are non-trivial. I can understand wanting to hide the hard stuff … but let me put it to you like this: if you or your company were to die tomorrow … wouldn’t you want your children, or your employees children, to be able to read and see what you’ve dedicated part of your life to build? I know I do…