As part of making Sourcegraph open source, we now build Sourcegraph (product direction and issues) as an open product, and open company. Our website and documentation is now open source which holds product- and company-related docs.
Here's how we define these terms:
This means the product direction is public and open for input.
You might not realize it, but the products you use every day are not just open source; they are also open products. Products like Kubernetes and Visual Studio Code do all their product planning in the open. They get useful input from the community and make it easy to integrate and rely on their products.
This means that principles, strategies, and processes for internal company functions are publicly documented, including for recruiting, marketing, pricing, and sales—not just engineering and product.
Being an open company is important because being an open product isn't enough to gain the trust of developers. You need to do the same for other important parts of the company that affect the product, the open-source project, and the users. See GitLab's pricing strategy in their public handbook for a great example of this.
Open company doesn't mean that everything is public; only principles, strategies, and processes related to our internal functions. We're proud to be sharing more about how we run Sourcegraph Inc!
To learn more about what open source means at Sourcegraph, see the open source FAQs and license documentation.